Josie is surprised that her tutor is a man, that he is young, and that he is startlingly handsome. She considers walking back into the office of that horrible modern building and telling the waif behind the desk that she’s made a mistake, that she doesn’t want a tutor for the day, that she wants to go back to her hotel room and drink Orangina and vodka.
The tutor shakes her hand, and she’s surprised by the heat of his skin-she has been cold for so many days. She pulls her hand away as if she’s been scorched.
“So you’re a French teacher,” he says to her in French.
“Oui,” she answers. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken French to anyone but American teenagers.”
She doesn’t say: It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken at all.
She decided to hire a tutor only yesterday when she realized that after three days in Paris she hadn’t said more than a few words-when ordering a croissant or a glass of wine or asking the hotel maid for an extra towel. Suddenly the prospect of a day of conversation terrifies her. She doesn’t feel capable of conversation.
“Are you here in Paris for business or pleasure?”
It’s a trick question. She has no business and she has no pleasure. She quit her job three weeks ago. The man she loved died three weeks ago.
“I’m here to buy shoes,” she finally answers.
He looks at her feet. She’s wearing red Converse sneakers, the same shoes she always wears. Her students loved her shoes. Her old boyfriends, slackers one and all, loved her shoes. But Simon wanted her to buy grown-up shoes, pumps with three-inch heels, strappy sandals, red stilettos. And so he bought them tickets to fly to Paris.
“We’ll go shopping,” the tutor says.
“No, I was-”
“No reason to sit in a classroom,” he tells her. “Paris is our classroom.”
He looks around while she presses her hand to her stomach, which is contracting in fierce spasms. She doesn’t want to get sick like she did yesterday on the métro. Yet another reason she should be back in her hotel room, under the musty covers.
“We’ll take the bus,” the tutor says. “More to see, more to talk about.”
His enthusiasm is killing her.
“I’m Nicolas, by the way. Call me Nico.”
“Josie,” she says.
“Josie,” he repeats, smiling, as if he’s just discovered something wonderful. “Let’s buy shoes.”
On the bus she loses herself in memory. Six months ago. She stood on the school stage, working with one of her students on the upcoming play. Josie looked up when the door to the theater opened and closed, letting in a flash of light and a glimpse of a tall man wearing a black suit. Silver hair. And then darkness again.
She looked back at the boy on the stage.
“Go ahead. Try it one more time,” she said gently.
But the boy was peering into the darkness of the theater. Now he’d never speak his lines louder than a whisper. Take a shy boy and put him onstage-and what? He discovers his inner strength and transforms himself in front of his peers? What was she thinking in casting Brady as the lead? She was thinking of saving him, nothing less. But Brady, as cute and sweet and smart as he may be, cannot belt out his lines, cannot plant a loud smacking kiss on the lips of lovely Glynnis Gilmore.
“Dad,” the boy said.
Josie looked into the darkness of the theater. The man was sitting there, somewhere. Damn him.
“Brady. Ignore your father. We have another fifteen minutes.”
Brady looked at her, his eyes wide with fear. “I can’t do it with him here.”
Josie walked toward him on the stage. He stood against the papier-mâché stone wall as if it were holding him up. She would have to show him how to use the stage as if he owned it, not as if he were hiding among the props.
“He might be here opening night,” she said quietly. “So will a lot of other people. You have to forget about that space. It’s this space here that matters.”
He nodded. His long straight hair fell in front of his face-his own private curtain. He was the kind of boy she would have loved in high school. Maybe that’s why she chose him. Twenty-seven years old and she was still behaving like a teenager.
“Try the line again. To me.”
He nodded. He held her eyes. He took in a gulp of air. He whispered, “I can’t say the line to you. I can’t say the line to anyone.”
Love me. Love me. “Say it over and over again,” she would tell him later. “Say it as if you’re ordering her to do as she’s told.” But right then, with his father in the theater, she whispered, “Go on home. We’ll work hard tomorrow.”
“My son thinks you’re wonderful,” the man said. He looked at her with his green eyes and she looked at his mouth instead, then at the open V of his sweater. Gray sweater under a black suit. Silver hair that curled at the nape of his neck. She had nowhere to look.
“I think he’s pretty great.”
“You teach French and theater?” he asked.
“I teach French and I stumble around in the theater.”
He smiled. He was handsome the way Brady might be some day. But this big, bold man could never have been shy or sweet. Was this the reason Brady couldn’t claim his role onstage?
“Simon,” he said, offering his hand.
“Josie.” She shook his hand and felt his palm press into hers like a secret passing between them.
“Can he do this?” Simon asked, gesturing to the stage. Brady had gone to get his books and jacket. They were standing near the back of the theater. Josie had forgotten to turn on the lights. The dark room, the woody smell of the newly built set, the rows of empty chairs facing the other way-Josie already felt as if they were doing something illicit.
“Yes,” Josie lied.
“Then you’re really good,” Simon said.
“Dad!” Brady called, bounding up the stairs.
“Nice to meet you,” Josie said, turning to leave.
“Wait,” Simon said.
She couldn’t wait. She could barely catch her breath.
“Have a nice evening, you two.” She slipped out the door.
Love me. She was sideswiped by it, she would later tell her friend Whitney. She leaned against the wall in the hallway, clutching the script to her chest. Some kid’s dad. One sly smile and she was smitten.
“Don’t even think about it,” Whitney told her.
“It’s all I can think about,” she said on the phone that night. “I’ll quit teaching and join the Peace Corps.”
“You haven’t done anything,” Whitney reminded her.
“He’ll call tonight,” Josie told her.
“I have no good reason for calling you,” he said.
“I have no good reason for talking to you,” she told him.
They were both quiet for a moment. Josie had gone to bed an hour before, and had twisted her mind around him, his words, his eyes, the V of his exposed neck, until she lay there, exhausted, as if beaten by something. When the phone rang, her hand leapt at the receiver.
“And I don’t do this,” he said, his voice surprisingly unsure. “I don’t call women-especially my son’s teacher-at home late at night.”
“You’re married.”
“I’m married.”
“I’m joining the Peace Corps. I decided earlier tonight.”
“Can I see you before you ship off?”
She could have said no. She could have said “I’ll lose my job. I’ll lose myself.” But she said yes. Yes.
“How did you come to be a French teacher?” the tutor asks.
Nico. His name slips away, as easily as her concentration. He keeps talking, the bus rumbles along busy streets, passengers come and go, bumping past them, the smell of sausage fills the stale air, and every once in a while he stops talking and she is required to say something. All of this used to be easy, Josie reminds herself. In fact, I used to do it so well.
“My parents didn’t have a lot of money,” she tells the tutor in French. She and Nico speak only French and she is surprised by how natural that is, as if the foreign words are easier for her to find than English words now. “We never traveled. I read a book about a young girl in Paris and I wanted to be that girl. And so I started studying French as if I could change everything in my life by speaking a different language.”
“Did it work?”
She looks at him. “No,” she says. “But maybe I’ll try again.”
“Is this your first trip to Paris?”
“Yes,” she lies. She had spent her junior year here, but she is tired of talking. There is nothing to say about that year unless she tells him about the boys, the sex, the hashish, the hangovers.
“Did you come alone?” he asks.
“No,” she lies. “My friend Whitney is spending the day at art galleries.” She has never been a liar before and now the lies spill from her lips. Whitney hates Paris, hates art galleries, and, in fact, hates Josie now. “If you sleep with him,” Whitney had said the next morning, when Josie told her she was meeting Simon for a drink, “you’re alone in this. He’s married, he’s old, and he’s your student’s father. I’m not getting on this love train with you, girl. I’m not even going to be there after the crash.”
The crash.
“You will love Paris,” the tutor says with his unending optimism. “I will make sure of that.”
She looks at him, surprised.
“I hired a French tutor. Not an ambassador.”
He doesn’t stop smiling. “I don’t charge extra for those services.”
She looks away. She wishes he were less attractive, less eager. She would like to hate him, but here she is, following him off the bus as if this is exactly what she wants to do. They are in the heart of the bustling Sixth Arrondissement, at the carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, and she stops on the sidewalk, panic-stricken. What is she doing here? How can she take another step forward?
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “The stores are too expensive here. We’re just pretending.”
Pretending? Did she misunderstand him? So far, everything she has done since Simon died has been a pretense. Everything except for the deep, bottomless sleep she stumbles into, as if plummeting off a cliff, every night.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
He takes her arm and moves her effortlessly across the street with the flow of people. She’s astonished that it’s so easy-he leads, she walks. Yesterday, without someone at her side, she stood paralyzed in front of the gates of Père Lachaise Cemetery for over an hour. She wanted to see-what? Jim Morrison’s grave site? Oscar Wilde’s tomb? Finally, she turned, threw up behind a tree, métroed back to her hotel, and burrowed back into her bed.
She shouldn’t have come to Paris. She should have thrown away the plane tickets. The seat on the plane beside her was empty. Simon’s seat, in business class, her constant reminder of what should have been. Champagne, wine, long conversations about Montmartre and Giverny, whispered promises, perhaps even a wandering hand under the blanket. Instead, she took two sleeping pills and awoke in Paris, groggy and disoriented.
“How about these?” the tutor asks. Nico. If she can remember his name, she can pull herself out of the slog of her mind and back to Paris. Shoes. He’s holding a turquoise patent-leather shoe in front of her face. It’s got a four-inch heel that looks like a dagger.
“Perfect,” she tells him.
“She’ll try these on,” he tells a woman.
They’re in a shoe store, but Josie can’t remember walking in. The saleswoman knows that it’s all a ruse. She’s looking at Josie with contempt, as if her red Converse sneakers are sullying the white marble floor. Josie tells her she wears a size 38 and the saleswoman mutters “Américaine” under her breath.
Nico sits next to her on the zebra-striped bench.
“Your accent is perfect,” he whispers. “It’s the shoes that give you away.”
“How much do the blue shoes cost?” she asks him.
“Your salary. Don’t even think about it. We’re playing a game.”
“She knows.”
“Who cares? There’s no one else in this ridiculous store.”
The store has plastic pigs hanging from the ceiling. Everything is patent leather, even the saleswoman’s miniskirt and her go-go boots.
The woman places a box on the bench beside Josie. “We only have size thirty-nine.” She walks away.
“Even my feet are too small for this place,” she whispers to Nico.
“Your feet are perfect,” he says.
“I have a boyfriend,” she tells him. It slips out of her mouth.
“Of course you do,” Nico says. He’s unstoppable.
She’s oddly pleased. For six months she could never say “I have a boyfriend.” She couldn’t say: “I’m having dinner with my boyfriend Wednesday night. My boyfriend is meeting me in San Francisco for the weekend. I’m going with my boyfriend to Paris.” For six months her happiness was a secret. Now her grief is a secret. She had no right to the boyfriend. And she has no right to this grief.
Nico lifts the shoes from the box and hands one to her. It’s an astonishing thing, this stiletto. She holds it in both hands, loving it.
“Put it on,” Nico says.
She takes off her sneakers and slides one bare foot into the shoe. It fits; in fact, it hugs her foot and feels as sleek as a new skin. She needs a new skin. Maybe her new skin is a turquoise “fuck me” shoe. She puts on the other shoe and stands.
Her feet wobble. She giggles and the sound of her own laugh surprises her. She looks at Nico and feels herself blush.
“Look at you,” he says.
She looks in the mirror. She’s wearing jeans and a black tank top. The electric blue shoes transform her into someone else. She stands tall in the mirror, taller than she’s ever been. She’s lost weight in the past few weeks and she sees her own cheekbones, the clavicles below her neck. She’s not a schoolteacher. She’s a woman with a boyfriend on a trip to Paris. He couldn’t come but she’ll bring back some shoes that he’ll love. Josie smiles and the woman in the mirror smiles back. It’s a devilish smile.
“I’ll take them,” she says.
Nico laughs. “I wish I could buy them for you.”
“Seriously,” Josie says. “I want them.”
“They cost four hundred euros.”
Josie’s stomach somersaults; she thinks she might throw up. And in that second, instead of calculating the impossible cost of this pair of shoes, she counts weeks, weeks since she made love with Simon, weeks since her last period. She is pregnant. She knows this when she lifts her eyes in the mirror-from her wobbling feet to her belly. It’s the same taut stomach, the same narrow waist. But now she’s carrying Simon’s baby.
“Let’s go,” she says to the French tutor. She can’t remember his name. She teeters back to the bench on the perilous heels and drops down beside him. She can’t get the shoes off fast enough. The saleswoman is smirking, leaning back against her perch by the desk, a pink-snouted pig hovering about her head.
Josie drops her head between her legs.
“Are you all right?” the tutor asks. He places his hand on her back. His hand is on fire and the heat spreads through her thin top, wraps around her body, and heats up her belly.
“No,” she tells him, taking in deep, slow breaths.
“Hey, Josie. C’mere,” Brady called from across the room.
She looked up. Brady usually called her Ms. Felton. She insisted that her students call her Josie and watched as they struggled with the name, a kid’s name for a teacher, a young teacher who dressed like they did, a teacher who hated claiming authority for any reason other than that she earned it.
He was standing next to the snack table, holding a plastic glass as if it were a gin and tonic, his arm thrown around an attractive older woman. This was the new Brady, the star of the show.
Josie walked toward him, thinking, Yes, he’ll be his father’s son after all, there’s the bold smile, the look-at-me tilt of the head. Josie stopped and someone bumped into her from behind. The attractive woman under Brady’s arm was his mother. Josie was walking to meet her lover’s wife.
“Mom, this is Josie. Ms. Felton. The director!”
Josie shook the woman’s hand, looking at her hand, and then, seeing a diamond there, looked up, into warm eyes, a wide smile. A tiny half-moon scar on a high cheekbone.
“I want to thank you,” the woman said. Her voice was deep and honeyed. A beautiful voice.
Josie, who always had something to say, was struck dumb. The woman’s hand moved to her arm, holding her there.
“You did so much for him,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.
“Mom,” Brady complained.
“He’s good,” Josie said, stupidly, as if that was all she could muster.
“He’s amazing,” the woman said. “But until today, no one else knew that. Just his father and I. Brady didn’t even know it.”
Josie stared at her.
“But you must have known,” the woman insisted.
“Mom.” Brady shook his head. “Parents and teachers should never meet. It’s a mortifying experience.”
“Have you met my husband?”
“No.”
“Yeah,” Brady said. “At rehearsal that day.”
“I forgot. Did he come tonight?”
She knew he was in San Francisco. She would drive in and stay with him at his pied-à-terre tonight.
“He’s got a meeting in the city,” Brady said. “He’ll come tomorrow night.”
“You did a wonderful job,” the woman said, her hand still holding Josie’s arm. “At the point when Brady says, ‘Do you love me’-or ‘Will you love me’-what is it…”
“ ‘Love me,’ ” Brady says, his voice soft, his eyes hidden behind his curtain of hair.
“That’s it,” his mom went on. “When he said that to the girl-who was very good, what a beauty she is-well, I almost cried. I don’t know why. It just… touched me somehow.”
“It’s a good moment in the play,” Josie said.
The woman was lovely. She was warm and straightforward and vibrant. Josie had wanted a shrew. Instead, this woman smiled and said, “You have a gift.”
They climbed the stairs to the third floor. Josie looked at every apartment door of this Russian Hill town house and silently pleaded, Don’t come out. She couldn’t imagine what Simon would say to his neighbors. This is my son’s teacher! This is my lover! This is Josie. I just met her a couple of weeks ago and now I’m bringing her home for a quick fuck!
He unlocked the door to his apartment and she dashed into the dark room. He reached for the light switch on the wall and flicked it on, closing the door behind him. Then he wrapped his arms around her from behind.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I’m scared. I feel like a thief breaking into someone’s house.”
He turned her around. “Look at me.” He lifted her chin.
She looked into his eyes and smiled. He made it easy. He looked so sure about this, as if there was no question in the world they should be standing here, wrapped in each other’s arms, gazing at each other. Maybe her fears were childish, immature. An older woman would be able to do this without trembling knees.
“I met your wife,” she said.
“Shh,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. She could feel her heart pounding against his chest. And then, lost in the kiss, she forgot everything for a moment. When he pulled his mouth away, she caught her breath.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“This is her place,” Josie said.
“No. It’s mine, really. I mean, it’s ours, but she rarely uses it. I stay here when I have late meetings or early meetings. On a rare occasion we stay here when we come in for a show or dinner.”
Josie pulled away from him and looked around. The room was masculine-all leather and dark wood, with a cool blue ocean painting that filled one wall. A model airplane hung from a wire in the middle of the room. Josie reached up and touched a wing; it spun in the air.
“I have a pilot’s license,” Simon explained. “That’s a model of my Cessna.”
Josie looked at him. “Your wife is perfect,” she said. “I mean, she’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone I could hate.”
“I didn’t fall for you because I hate my wife.”
“Why did you fall for me?” Josie turned away from the long, cresting wave of the painting and looked into Simon’s eyes.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said simply. “I saw you onstage that day-I don’t know-I was starstruck. Can that happen?”
“Have you brought other women here?”
“No. I told you. I’ve never done this before.”
“I’m an idiot. I believe you.”
He pulled her into his arms. “I promise you.”
They kissed and she pressed herself into his body, wrapping her arms low around his waist, pulling him closer. She felt too many layers of clothes between them. She started to pull off his coat.
“Wait. There’s a Murphy bed. I have to pull it down.”
She turned around, surprised. It was a one-room studio and, sure enough, there was no bed.
Simon walked to the wall unit, then slid the bookcases aside, revealing a bed built into the wall.
“Amazing,” she said.
He pulled a cord and the bed descended gracefully. It was neatly made, with pale blue sheets and a gray blanket.
“I can’t,” Josie said. She could feel her throat tightening.
Simon looked at her.
“It’s her bed. It’s where you sleep with your wife.”
“Josie.”
She shook her head. “I feel like Goldilocks in someone else’s house. I can’t do this.”
“The sheets are fresh. I made the bed this morning.”
“No.”
He came toward her and took her in his arms again.
“She’ll never know,” he said.
“Let’s go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
Later, in their room on the fourteenth floor of the Clift Hotel, they lay in each other’s arms after sex and Ghirardelli chocolate and scotch and more sex.
“How did Brady do?” Simon asked.
Josie looked at him. “I wondered why you hadn’t asked.”
“I should have been there.”
“You’ll come tomorrow.”
“I didn’t want to be there with my wife. I didn’t want to stand next to her and shake your hand. She knows me too well.”
Josie climbed on top of him. She looked down into Simon’s face.
“We can’t do this, can we?”
“We have to do this.”
He pulled her face to his and kissed her.
“Why?” Josie asked.
“Because I have to trust this. I know what love is-I love my wife, I love my son-I won’t lie to you. But I’ve never felt this-I don’t know-need. Desire. I’ve never known this”-he pressed her close to him, finishing his sentence as a whisper in her ear-“before.”
Josie watched him for a moment. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “I’ve had boyfriends, but this is not what that was. What is this?”
“Kiss me,” Simon said.
Josie can hear the shoe saleswoman and the tutor talking to each other. She hears the words petite amie: girlfriend. “Does your girlfriend do this often?”
The tutor doesn’t correct her. “No,” he says. “She’s not feeling well today.”
Josie rinses her hands in the tiny sink in the back of the store and considers slipping a pair of shoes into her bag. She has never shoplifted in her life, but who knows what she might be capable of now? The saleswoman didn’t want her in the bathroom of her piggy store, but Josie had marched through the curtains anyway and found a toilet to throw up in rather than the white marble floor. She picks up a pair of red shoes-Dorothy-in-Oz shoes-and clicks the heels.
There’s no place like home.
Why should she fly home on Sunday? Why not stay in Paris and become Nico’s girlfriend and shoplifter of expensive shoes?
She puts the shoes back on the shelf. She steps back into the showroom.
“Ça va?” Nico asks. He looks concerned. Most of his students are not pregnant, crazy ladies, she assumes.
“Ça va,” she sighs, and offers a smile. Poor guy. He deserves better in a girlfriend.
“I don’t want the shoes,” she tells the saleswoman. “I seem to be allergic to them.”
Nico nods and takes her arm, guiding her out of there.
“Does your boyfriend know?” he asks her when they are on the street, standing close to each other in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, all of them wearing extraordinary shoes.
She is not surprised; this tutor seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. Why shouldn’t he also be able to guess her secrets? She shakes her head.
“Will he be happy?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says, assuredly. “He will be very happy.”
“Good,” Nico says. “I once had a girlfriend who broke up with me and then, a month later, called to tell me she was pregnant. She wanted to have the baby. I told her I’d raise the baby with her. She said she was moving to Morocco and that she would send me pictures of the kid from time to time. I never heard from her again.”
“That’s awful.”
“I think about it all the time. The kid would be three now. I wander through playgrounds looking for him. Or her.”
Thunder rumbles through the skies.
“Let’s find someplace to go,” Nico says, “before it rains.”
But the skies open immediately and the rain blasts them. Josie feels Nico’s arm wrap around her back and move her along rue de Grenelle. She doesn’t mind the rain; she doesn’t mind his arm around her. She’ll give herself up to this, she decides. It is easier than every day of the past weeks.
Nico opens a door and leads her inside. It is a small museum, though it looks nothing like a museum. It has vaulted ceilings and pale marble walls and floors. A sign reads: MUSÉE MAILLOL. A teenage boy chews gum behind a counter; he doesn’t even look up. Josie glances around-she doesn’t see anyone else in the building. Ahead of them is an enormous statue of a nude man.
Nico leads her to the desk and buys two tickets.
“I can pay,” she says.
“No. Please.”
The boy cracks his gum and pushes his comic book under the counter. He passes them the tickets and a brochure: Marilyn Monroe: The Last Photographs.
They walk past the turnstile. There is no one to take their tickets. When Josie looks back, the boy is reading his comic book again. For a moment, he looks like Brady, serious and shy. Brady before he became a star. Brady before.
She puts her hand on her belly. The nausea has passed, but now she feels light-headed, a little dizzy. She has never been pregnant, has never yet considered having a baby. She had thought that would be years away, when she was married and had moved from teaching to playwriting, her real passion. She had imagined a young husband, a cottage in the country, a couple of big dogs, and a vegetable garden.
But she’s pregnant without the guy, the job, the house, the dogs. In fact, it’s all she has. This baby.
She has no right to this baby. She thinks of Simon’s wife at the funeral, her skin the color of ash, her eyes as flat as a lake. The woman didn’t remember Josie. She nodded, accepting condolences that meant nothing. Nothing could penetrate that grief. What right did Josie have to her grief?
“She is tragic, no?” the French tutor asks.
Josie looks up. Marilyn Monroe stares back at her, her mouth slightly open, her eyes half closed. She looks drunk on sex, on booze, on death. She looks luscious and ripe and ready to die. Josie’s eyes fill up. She steps back, away from the seductive stare. They’re in a gallery space, full of Marilyn. Every photo-and the photos are huge, pressing the limits of each room-is of Marilyn. Marilyn with her head tilted back, a sated smile on her face. Marilyn drawing on a cigarette. Marilyn puckering up. Marilyn with her hand resting on the curve of her hip, stretched out on a couch, offering herself up. Love me.
“She killed herself three days after this photo shoot,” Nico says, reading from the brochure.
“You can see that she was ready,” Josie says.
“To die?”
“To give herself up to death. It looks like she was already dying.”
“You will have the baby, yes?”
Josie looks at him. Nico. He has the kindest eyes. She imagines his sweet child with eyes like this. It’s a boy and he’s holding his mama’s hand, walking through the market in Marrakesh. He’s got a swoon of sand-colored hair and everyone stops to stare at the lovely child.
“Yes,” she says. The minute she says it, she makes it true. “He’s mine.”
“It’s a boy?”
“I think so,” she says. She has Simon’s boy in her belly. It’s not fair. His wife has nothing. And she has this.
“Your boyfriend is very lucky.”
She smiles. Her smile breaks and tears spill from her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Nico says.
“No, no. It’s the photographs,” Josie tells him. “They’re so sad. Look at that one.” She turns back to the wall and Marilyn’s shadowed face. She can hear the rain against the glass roof that covers the courtyard. It sounds like an ominous movie score-there’s an army approaching or a madman about to break into someone’s house. She wraps her arms about herself. Her skin is still wet from the rain and she’s suddenly chilled.
“Didn’t she have an affair with your president Kennedy?” Nico asks.
“I think so,” Josie says. “Apparently back in those days American presidents could get away with their indiscretions.”
“Not anymore. Here we laugh at what happened to Clinton. Why should anyone care?”
“Except his wife,” Josie says.
“Yes. It’s a private problem. Not a public one. It has nothing to do with politics.”
“I wonder,” Josie says, staring into Marilyn’s dreamy eyes, “what it has to do with. Why men cheat. Why they fall into bed with pretty girls.”
“For the time that they’re in the arms of a beautiful woman, they’re invincible,” Nico says.
“Then they should stay there,” Josie says quietly.
“Are we still talking about your presidents?”
Josie doesn’t answer. She wanders down the wall of Marilyn. She feels drunk on Marilyn, sexed up and sloppy, as if her own sheets have been thrown off the bed, exposing her.
Once, after making love with Simon at her cottage, she fell asleep. She woke up and saw him standing at the side of the bed, watching her. He was dressed, ready to leave, waiting to say goodbye. He couldn’t wake her. He told her he stood there for a half hour, already late for a meeting, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Come back to bed,” she had said.
He did.
It’s in Marilyn’s mouth, it’s in her eyes, it’s in the curve of her generous hip. Come back to bed.
Nico’s by her side.
“Do you have a girlfriend now?” she asks. Une petite amie. She loves the phrase in French. Little friend. Even a boyfriend is a petit ami. On her lips, the words taste as sweet as they sound.
“No,” Nico says. “I was waiting for you.”
“But I’m taken,” she tells him. Their tone is as light as the smoke drifting from Marilyn’s cigarette.
Here, in the room with Marilyn, everything reeks of sex. It’s as if they’ve just done it and now, once again, are about to do it. Come back to bed.
“If you were taken,” Nico says, “you wouldn’t be so very sad.”
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Josie’s father had asked, showing up at her cottage the morning after she returned from San Francisco, the morning after her stay with Simon at the Clift.
He was sitting in her tiny kitchen, drinking coffee, probably his fifth or sixth cup of the day. He had driven up from San Jose to Marin to surprise her. It was the anniversary of her mother’s death, but they would never speak of that. It would be there, the idea of it, in the air between them, all day. They would talk about her fancy job at the prep school, his lousy grocery store, her old best friend Emily who lives next to her old ma, his middle-of-the-night heart murmur, but they would never talk about her late mother, his wife.
“I don’t have time, Dad. I’m working too hard.”
“A young girl shouldn’t work so hard.”
“I like it,” she told him, sitting across the table from him. “I love it.”
“Love. Love is for boyfriends, not jobs.”
He looked old, her father, his hair mostly gone, his skin mottled with age spots, his face jowly. She calculated: thirty-five years older than she was-and just ten years older than Simon. Impossible, she thought. Simon was fit and firm, though when he slept she saw that his skin relaxed in a way that surprised her. It seemed to let go of his bones and suddenly he was vulnerable, soft. Something about that moved her, as if he too needed someone to watch over him.
But her father was old and cranky and out of touch with her world. Simon didn’t seem old to her. True, he was a world apart from the boys she usually fell for-the long-haired, rumpled, mumbling boys. The boys who come too quickly. The boys who throw on yesterday’s clothes. The boys who live in basement apartments and smell of pot and beer.
“Are you taking care of yourself, Dad? You still go for walks every day?”
“You think I sit around and do nothing? You think I’m getting fat?”
“You’re not getting fat, Dad. You look great.”
“You’re full of shit.”
She smiled. This was what her parents did, this squabbling. He looked pleased as punch, as if he’d just flexed his muscles for an admiring crowd.
“I worry about you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t worry,” she said gently. “I take care of myself.”
“So who’s the boyfriend?”
“There’s no boyfriend, Dad. I told you.”
“You got any cake? Coffee cake or something?”
Josie stood up and walked to the pantry. She took a loaf of whole wheat bread and sliced a couple of pieces, put them in the toaster. While she gathered jam, butter, plates, and knives, her dad told her about Emily’s new boyfriend, a lawyer in San Jose.
“Good for Emily,” Josie said, placing the toast in front of her dad.
“You and Emily used to be best friends. You couldn’t go anywhere without that girl.”
“That was a long time ago, Dad.”
“You call this coffee cake?”
“It’s all I have.”
“I should have told you I was coming. You could have bought me a cake.”
“I would have bought you a cake, Dad,” Josie said, smiling.
“I like a little surprise sometimes. But this is the price I pay.” He held up the whole wheat toast.
“Put jam on,” Josie urged him. “It needs a little something.”
“So what happened with you and Emily?”
“Nothing, Dad. Life. We grew up. I moved away, she stayed home. People change.”
“I don’t change.”
“Thank God for that.”
“You making fun of me?”
“Never.”
He smiled and she thought of her mother, sitting next to him, both of them short and a little fat, both of them fighting over every little thing, smacking each other’s arms like some married version of the Three Stooges. Josie was always embarrassed by them, embarrassed by her love for them, and then, when her mother died, she yearned for the noise of them.
“You could have a girlfriend,” Josie said gently. “It’s enough time.”
“Ha,” her father said. “You think there’s another Franny out there somewhere?”
“No.”
“One of a kind.”
“I know. Maybe the next one is a different kind.”
“There’s no next one.”
“You might try.”
“You want Emily to ask her nice boyfriend if he has any friends at the law firm for you?”
“No, Dad.”
The phone rang. She leapt at it.
“Hello.”
“I miss you.”
“My dad’s visiting. Can I call you later?”
“No. I’m headed into the meeting. I just wanted to tell you-”
He didn’t say anything. She waited. She watched her dad, who fiddled unhappily with his toast.
“Will he be there tonight?”
“No.”
“I’ll come by.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Hey, Whitney. My dad wants me to start dating. You know any eligible single guys to fix me up with?”
“Don’t.”
“Okay. Give it some thought. He’s right. I should have a boyfriend. I should fall in love with someone and bring him to meet my dad.”
Her dad nodded, smiling, his lips smeared with boysenberry jam.
“I wanted to tell you I’m falling in love with you,” Simon said.
“That’s crazy,” Josie said. “You must know some guys. The good ones can’t all be married.”
“Stop it.”
“My father would like you,” Josie tells Nico. They’re standing side by side, gazing at a photo of Marilyn, naked, a sheer scarf draped over her body.
“Not your mother? It’s usually the mothers I charm.”
“My mother’s dead.”
She moves to the next photograph on the gallery wall-Marilyn taking a long, lazy drag on her cigarette.
“Lung cancer. Eight years ago. She never smoked a cigarette in her life.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My father smoked. Quit the day she was diagnosed. A bit late, though.”
“You were so young.”
“I’ll tell you a story I’ve never told anyone. About my mother’s death.”
He looks pleased. This man is way too easy.
“That last winter my parents were in Palm Springs, staying with my aunt for a month. I flew down there a couple of days before my mom died and then flew back with my dad. They had my mother’s body flown up-Dad wanted her buried at a cemetery near their house. I had packed my mother’s clothes to have her buried in. When we were waiting for our luggage at SFO, standing in front of the…” Josie stops. She is suddenly there, waiting for the bags, no longer telling a story. It had been sweltering hot in Palm Springs and now it was frigid, even in the airport. Her coat was packed in her suitcase and she stood there, teeth chattering, waiting for the bags to arrive.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know the word.”
“What word?”
“For the thing that the suitcases drop onto. The-Oh my God, I can’t even remember the word in English.”
“Le carrousel de bagages?”
“Yes. ‘Carousel.’ That’s the word.”
“Tell me the story.”
Josie feels panic stirring inside her. She looks around. Marilyn; a cigarette, a martini, puckered lips, long, manicured fingernails. Marilyn, Marilyn. She is drunk on Marilyn.
“We were all standing there, at the baggage claim, and first a shoe dropped down-not a suitcase, but a single shoe. It circled the carousel once and everyone watched it. When it passed by me a second time I recognized it. My mother’s navy-blue shoe. Someone laughed. I grabbed it and tucked it under my arm, embarrassed somehow. And then a pair of underpants dropped from the chute-I’m not kidding-my mother’s flowered underpants. The ones I chose from her drawer to have her buried in. Then her blouse. A peach-colored silk blouse she wore for special occasions. It almost floated down, as if worn by a fucking ghost. I grabbed each item and tucked the clothes in my arms. Her bra. Imagine: everyone was watching. Her C-cup rose-colored bra tumbled down. My father walked away. Finally my suitcase dropped down the chute and it was partially open, the items spilling out. I grabbed the bag and started stuffing everything back.”
Josie’s crying, tears running down her face, and she can’t stop. Nico pulls her toward him and holds her. She lets him. She swipes tears from her face but there’s no stopping them.
Simon’s gone.
“I’ve been sitting in my car across the street. I waited until your father was gone.”
Josie reaches out and places her hand on Simon’s chest.
“I wanted to walk up to him and say, ‘I’m Josie’s boyfriend. She doesn’t need another boyfriend.’ ”
“But it’s not true. You’re not my boyfriend. You’re someone’s husband. You’re the man I sneak away to have sex with. You’re the reason I can’t even talk to my best friend anymore.”
“Don’t.”
“I can’t give my father the one pleasure he wants.”
“I know, Josie. That’s why I sat in my car for the past two hours.”
“You have Brady’s play tonight. It starts in an hour.”
“I can’t go.”
“This can wait. Brady can’t wait.”
“I can’t give you more than this.”
“I know that. I’m not asking for more.”
“You’re asking for a man to introduce to your father.”
“Why are you here? What do you want?”
“I want you.”
“It stopped raining,” Nico says. “Let’s go have lunch.”
Josie finds a Kleenex in her purse and wipes her face. She has stopped crying but she feels raw. When she first learned about Simon, when Whitney called that Saturday morning and told her to turn on the television, she couldn’t cry-or scream or rage. She sat stunned, in front of her computer, Googling news reports, trying to find out everything she could about the crash of a small plane in the mountains near Santa Barbara. The phone kept ringing and she never answered it. Later there were dozens of messages from other teachers, a couple of Brady’s classmates, even a long, sobbing message from Glynnis Gilmore. She had fallen in love with Brady on opening night, she said.
Now a ridiculous memory of her mother’s death has unmoored her. And the French tutor has galloped in on his white horse.
They leave the museum in a hurry, as if chased by Marilyn’s hungry eyes. The boy at the front desk doesn’t even look at them as they leave.
“I know a restaurant,” Nico says, and he takes her arm, moving her quickly along the slick city streets. The sun reflects off puddles and wet cars; Josie digs into her purse for her sunglasses. She’s disoriented, her mind swimming in too many dark holes: her mother, Simon, Marilyn. She needs to come up for air; her lungs are bursting with the effort.
“Voilà,” Nico pronounces, as if he created this restaurant on this corner, as if he’s responsible for its charming yellow walls, the pale blue tablecloths, the profusion of flowers. He’s transported them to Provence and Josie takes a deep breath.
“You like it?” he asks proudly.
“Very much.”
“I knew you would,” he says.
They’re seated in the back corner of the small room, and Nico orders a pichet of rosé wine.
While he speaks to the waitress, Josie follows the dark path of memory to his funeral. Even this cheery restaurant can’t save her.
She remembers Simon’s wife-Brady’s mother-standing in the front of the church. The woman stepped away from her sisters and mother and friends and stood in front of the two coffins. No one dared to join her side. This was her grief, her devastating loss. She fell to her knees and wailed, a sound that echoed in the church. Josie turned and walked back to her car, parked almost a mile away since the crowd was so enormous. In that long walk she clenched her hands until her nails dug into the skin of her palms and bled. She had lost Simon and now she had lost the right to her grief.
Love me. Josie had never known that she needed the kind of passion in life that tipped her off balance, that carried her aloft. She had always thought of herself as a little too flimsy for love. With Simon, she lost her bearings, she gave herself up to love. And it filled her, made her weightier, fuller, richer.
“My boyfriend died,” she says aloud.
Nico looks at her, surprised. The waitress arrives with the pichet of wine and they are silent while she fills their glasses. She places menus on the table and walks away.
“I lied,” Josie says. “I’m not here with a friend. I’m alone. I was supposed to come to Paris with him. Simon.”
“What happened?” Nico asks gently.
“Three weeks ago he took his son, Brady, down to Santa Barbara to look at the university. Simon flies his own plane-he’s good, he’s been flying for years. They don’t know what happened. The plane went down in the hills above Santa Barbara. Both of them were killed.”
“My God.”
“I haven’t been able to talk about it with anyone. First he was my secret. Now my grief is my secret. I was his lover, not his wife.”
“It’s his baby.”
“Yes. I didn’t know. But I’m sure I’m pregnant.”
Nico reaches a hand across the table and places it on Josie’s hand. Her face is streaked with tears again.
“He has a lovely wife. She lost everything. I lost a lover. I don’t have a right to this grief. He wasn’t mine. Brady wasn’t mine. I was stealing someone else’s love.”
“I don’t think you were stealing love.”
“His wife deserved his love. His wife deserves this grief. I’m nobody. I went to the funeral because I was Brady’s teacher. But that’s a ruse, that’s a lie. No one knows about me. And if they did, they’d hate me.”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone else knows. Or what they think.”
“You’re a stranger. You’re French. What do you know?”
Nico laughs and suddenly Josie laughs, surprising herself. She drinks her wine, which is as light and cool as a breeze.
“Let’s go to Provence,” she says.
“For a French lesson?” Nico asks, smiling.
“Yes,” Josie says. “Run away with me.”
“Avec plaisir,” Nico says, and the waitress stands before them, her pen poised above her pad.
Nico orders for the two of them, though he glances at Josie to make sure she agrees. She nods her approval.
“Today?” Nico asks when the waitress leaves. “On the next train?”
“Why not?”
They clink glasses.
“Maybe I shouldn’t drink,” Josie says. “The baby.”
“In France they say a glass or two of wine is good for the baby.”
“Bien sûr,” Josie says, and she drinks.
She feels giddy, as if the wine has already made her lightheaded. Maybe it’s the words that echo in her head: My boyfriend died. She finally has spoken the words.
“There is no friend at the art galleries today?”
“Whitney doesn’t approve of affairs and she can’t stand contemporary art. She’s at home in San Francisco, thinking I got what I deserved.”
“Leave her there,” Nico says. “I’m glad we won’t have to bring her to Provence with us.”
“And there is no one expecting you home for dinner tonight?” Josie asks. They are flirting-it’s a game, a life raft, a way out of the mess she’s in. She is talking again, she’s crying, she’s even laughing. What could be wrong with this? She sips her wine and leans close.
“Sometimes I meet two other tutors for drinks in the Marais. We complain about our students and drink too much. Sometimes we go home and have sex with each other.”
“All three of you?” Josie’s eyes open wide.
“No,” Nico says. “I’m not very interested in the other man. It’s his girlfriend I love.”
“My God,” Josie says. “We’re a mess. All of us. Why is love so complicated?”
“Today isn’t complicated,” Nico says, raising his glass. “This is the first day I have enjoyed myself in a very long time.”
They clink glasses again. The waitress arrives and places bowls of mussels in front of them. She tucks tall glasses packed with frites between the bowls. The table is suddenly filled with wonderful-smelling food.
“I haven’t eaten in a very long time,” Josie says.
The first time Josie met Simon, alone, the day after Brady’s rehearsal, they sat for a short time at a restaurant in a town far from where they both lived. They ordered drinks-martini for Simon, white wine for Josie-and then ordered dinner: steak for Simon, grilled salmon for Josie. The food sat there, untouched, while they leaned toward each other and talked. Simon asked questions-Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you teach?-as if he were feasting on her rather than mere food. And Josie talked, as if she had never talked before, never told her story. When she said her mother died, he didn’t skip on to the next subject the way her boyfriends had. He asked her about her mother’s final week, about her father’s sadness, about the gold wishbone she wore around her neck that had belonged to her mother. The waiter asked them if there was anything wrong with their dinners.
“No, no,” they both said. “We’re fine. Everything’s wonderful.”
And still, they barely touched their food.
“What do you do on a perfect day?” Simon asked.
“I hike into the hills,” she told him. “I pack a picnic lunch and book and find a place to read by the river.”
“Take me,” he said.
He told her about flying, about the remarkable feeling of space and lightness and speed. He told her how he felt both reckless and safe at the same time-as if he could go anywhere, do anything, and yet he was master of his universe, completely in control.
“Take me,” she said.
But the only place they ever went was to bed-her bed, hotel beds, motel beds, a futon bed he carried to the middle of a field in the hills of West Marin. That first night they left the food on the table and too much money thrown onto the check and they drove for a long time. They found a country cabin, one of a small group of log cabins for rent on the side of a lake. Josie stayed in the car while Simon went into the office, but she could see the woman peering at her through the window. Josie looked away, fiddled with the radio, worried that her body would never stop trembling from so much desire.
When Simon returned to the car with a key in hand he said, “She asked if I was traveling with my daughter.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no. I don’t want to get arrested for what I’m going to do to you tonight.”
“She’ll never know.”
“She’ll know. The whole world will know.”
Josie was never loud in bed. She once bit the neck of a boyfriend in college. Better that than scream. She liked sex-it was a kind of game, a kind of athleticism that she was good at. But she didn’t know what it was to give herself to someone, to abandon herself, to take someone in.
That night she made enough noise for the woman to ask Simon in the morning: “Was everything all right in there?”
“Fine,” Simon said. “Everything was perfect.”
“How did you know?” she asked Simon weeks later. “That first time. How did you know what would happen when we made love that night?”
“I couldn’t stop trembling,” he said. “All through dinner. While we drove to the cabin. My body was electrified. I had never felt anything like it.”
“That never happened to you before?” Josie asked.
“You never happened to me before.”
Josie and Nico feast on mussels and fries. They lick their fingers, they toss shells into the bowl, they sop sauce with the hearty crusts of bread. When they are done the waitress brings a tangy green salad and a cheese plate, and more bread, this time filled with walnuts and cranberries.
Nico tells Josie about his childhood in Normandy, on a small farm, how once he got drunk on Calvados and fell asleep in the root cellar until morning. When he woke up he saw the police were everywhere, combing the grounds of the house, talking to neighbors, leading dogs into the woods.
He hid for a day, and at night he sneaked out and back into the woods. He wandered home minutes later and his parents rushed to embrace him.
“Where were you? What happened? Did someone take you?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
They determined that he had blocked out some terrible memory and for years after that, his parents, his friends, the neighbors, all treated him as if he carried some dark secret within him. His secret was his shame, that he had fallen asleep in a dark corner and that he had caused so much commotion over nothing.
“Did you ever tell them?” Josie asks. “Wouldn’t they now rather know that nothing bad happened to you?”
Nico shakes his head. “I’ve written a series of poems about that night,” he says. “Eventually they’ll read the poems. But even then, there’s no true story. I can’t undo the lie.”
They eat three kinds of cheeses-a runny, pungent Camembert, an aged chèvre that tastes like the earth, and a Roquefort that reminds Josie of her father, a man who eats bland food and sprinkles his salad with blue cheese.
“Our parents don’t know us,” Josie says. “They can’t know us. We hide ourselves from them. Once they knew everything about us and in order to escape them we keep our secrets, our private selves.”
“Did you escape your parents?” Nico asks.
“I had to. I was desperate to. They wanted me to go to San Jose State College and live at home. But I wanted to be a continent away from them. I thought they were old-fashioned and uneducated and-quelle horreur! I wanted to be a French girl! I wanted to be a sophisticate! I went to NYU and a year later my mother got sick. I should have stayed closer to home. I should have taken care of her that year. My father needed me.”
“You couldn’t have saved her.”
“No, but I could have saved my father.”
“I doubt it, Josie. You might have helped the burden, but you wouldn’t have made a bit of difference when it came to what he lost.”
Josie looks at him, surprised.
“How do you know?”
“I’m listening to you. I’m imagining your life.”
“But it’s more than that. How do you know about grief?”
“I don’t know,” Nico says. “My parents are alive. I’ve never lost someone I loved. I just think I know about you.”
“Is that because we’re strangers? I can tell you about Simon and you can tell me about your night in the cellar. We’ll disappear. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like talking to a stranger on a plane.”
“No. I’m right here. I’m listening to everything you’re saying.”
Josie looks around the restaurant. For a long time, the noise of other people’s conversations had faded, along with the clang of silverware, the soft music of a violin concerto. She had lost the world and found Nico-not a lover, not even a boyfriend for a night or two, but someone to talk to.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Don’t think I do this for all my students,” he tells her, smiling.
“You haven’t even corrected my French.”
“Your French is perfect.”
“Now you’re lying. Let’s not tell any lies today.”
“Then you should make your vowels more precise. They tend to float between consonants.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t lie.”
“All these years I’ve been speaking French with floating vowels?”
“You had no one to show you the way.”
Josie looks down, suddenly shy. He is smitten and she will leave him. She’s just promised that she won’t lie. And yet there is a lie in everything they share today. Because she won’t go to Provence with him. It’s another Josie who could catch the next train and curl up in a couchette with this blue-eyed Frenchman. This Josie-the one who lost Simon and quit her job, lied to her father, flew to France by herself-this Josie isn’t capable of anything more than a day with a French tutor.
But she has finally eaten a meal and had a conversation.
“I won’t ask for my money back from the school,” she tells Nico. “You’ve taught me something after all.”
“We’re not done,” he tells her.
Simon called her at school though she had told him not to. She could no longer focus on her work. She whispered into her cell phone, “I can’t talk. I have class in two minutes.”
“Meet me at the lake,” he whispered back. “At four.”
“I can’t,” she told him. “I have advisory.”
“Cancel it,” he said, and he hung up, so sure he was in the knowledge that she’d risk her job to see him. She canceled her meeting. She had canceled so many meetings, she had cut out of soccer practice even though she was supposed to be the assistant coach, and she had told the senior drama class that they should prepare their one-act plays on their own and that she’d step in to supervise in the final week. After three years as star teacher she was suddenly the slacker, the fuckup. She kept telling herself that she’d make up for it-this affair can’t go on forever-and besides, she needed Simon more than she needed this job. There are other jobs.
She met him at the lake where they first started their affair, an hour’s drive from the school. They’d been back a few times and Simon always asked for the same cabin. It was unseasonably cold and no one was renting these shacks, so the nasty woman who ran the place should have been happy to get their money. Instead, though, she asked Simon the same question every time. “Is that your daughter?”
Josie had never stepped into the office, had never seen the woman face-to-face, but she always felt the woman’s eyes on her back as they rushed into the cabin moments later.
“One of these days I’ll take you for a grown-up haircut,” Simon said. “I’ll buy you high-heeled shoes and we’ll toss those silly red things in the lake. I’ll buy you a cashmere sweater and wool slacks.”
“And then you’d lose interest in me,” Josie said. “I’d look like all the women you know. Your wife and your wife’s friends. Your business associates.”
“My wife-”
“I’m sorry,” Josie said. The unspoken rule. The unspoken wife. Off limits. Keep her out of the bedroom, the cabin, the motel room, off the futon in the middle of the field.
“Come here,” Simon said, and she stepped into his arms, silencing both of them.
Josie began to pull him toward the bed, but he resisted, smiling mischievously at her.
“We’re not going to bed,” he said. “Yet.”
“I can’t wait,” she told him. “I’ve already buried my face in your neck.”
She loved the smell of him, the soapy, musky Simon smell of him, and had told him that she could live off it, that if she could breathe him in every day she’d never need food again. “You’re losing weight,” he had told her. “Then let me breathe in more of you,” she had said.
“You have to wait. I rented a rowboat.”
“It’s freezing!”
“I have blankets. I brought a thermos of hot buttered rum.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“Stop.”
It was the other taboo, the other locked door. She didn’t believe that she was his first lover. He was too good at it. He knew how to have an affair and she was a novice, a child in an adult’s world.
“I’ve never loved like this,” he would insist.
“How have you loved?” she’d ask him. “Tell me.”
“No. Stop. Believe me.”
She never believed him.
Now he took her hand and led her out of the cabin. He retrieved a duffel bag from the trunk of his car and threw it over one shoulder. They walked toward the lake, which was shrouded in fog, a cold, damp fog that chilled her despite the down jacket she wore. The sky was bleached gray and the lake was the color of iron. A rowboat bobbed on the water at the end of the dock, candy-apple red, astonishing against all that muted color.
“The oars are in the boat!” a voice called, and they both turned toward the office. The old lady stood there, arms locked across her heavy chest, squinting at them.
“Thanks!” Simon called back.
The woman kept her eyes on Josie. The look was hateful, as if Josie had stolen all the good men from all the older women in the world.
“She scares me,” Josie whispered to Simon.
“Ignore her,” he said.
“I can’t. I can feel her watching me.”
But the door slammed behind them and the old crone was gone.
Simon held the side of the boat and Josie climbed in. He placed the duffel bag on the floor of the boat. Then he stepped in and took the oars.
“Grab some blankets,” he told her. “Stay warm while I row.”
She pulled out a Hudson Bay blanket, a couple of fur hats, and the thermos. She placed a hat on Simon’s head and leaned over to kiss him.
“Put yours on,” he said.
She pulled the hat low on her head and was immediately warmer. She took a swig from the thermos and the sweet, thick liquid spread through her body.
She passed it to Simon, who paused mid-row, drank, smiled, and then rowed again. After a few moments, the world around them vanished and they were engulfed by fog. The colors around them bled into one another-sky, fog, water-and only the red outline of the boat held them in, containing them.
Simon stopped rowing. At first the boat moved, rocking slightly, and then it slowed and finally stopped. They were silent and the only sound they could hear was the call of a crow somewhere far away.
“I want to make love to you here,” Simon said, his voice soft in the hushed air.
“It’s so cold.”
“We’ll bury ourselves in blankets.”
“We’ll tip over and drown and no one will ever find us.”
“Then we better not thrash around.”
“Impossible.”
“We’ll do our best.”
They drank more hot rum and they cocooned themselves in blankets on the bottom of the rowboat. They shimmied out of their clothes and the boat rocked. Icy water splashed against the side of the boat. They giggled and passed the thermos back and forth and held each other under the blankets, their bodies naked and electric. Josie was both cold and warm, scared and thrilled, energized and terrified of moving. When Simon ran his hand along her thigh, her hip, her stomach, she felt more than she had ever felt before-as if her nerve endings were jagged, exposed. His breath on her neck, his mouth on her breast, his hand between her legs, and the need to keep still, to restrain herself, as if any movement would plunge her into the black lake, made her feel as though she were caught in the whirling white fog around her.
When he slid inside her they kept very still and she could feel his deep breath; she could see his face looking down at her, his eyes holding hers.
“Don’t move,” he said, smiling.
When she came she felt her body exploding within, as if containing herself created something deeper, bigger, more seismic. And then he came, and kept coming, and the boat rocked and the water held them and the fog held them and the heavy sky held them.
He eased himself down and she felt his weight and the heat of his body.
Suddenly there was a cacophony of sound as if the birds had discovered them there, in the middle of their lake. The caws and screeches and trills were deafening, and though they turned their heads skyward, they couldn’t see a thing.
“It’s us making all that noise,” Simon said. “Echoes from orgasms.”
“That’s just what it sounds like inside me,” Josie said.
“I know,” Simon told her. “I just didn’t know everyone else could hear.”
It was later, back in the cabin, when they had taken a long, hot bath and finished the thermos of hot rum, that Simon said, “I love you,” and Josie said, “Don’t leave me.”
Nico looks up at the sky. Clouds linger, and somewhere in the far distance they can hear the grumble of thunder.
“We’re safe,” he says. “For a short while. Shall we try to walk to the train station?”
“We could walk to Provence,” Josie says.
“I’ve never been a patient man,” Nico says. “Put me on the fast train.”
“Then let’s walk to the train station.”
She doesn’t know if he is serious. She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t know herself these days, nor does she understand much of the ways of the world. So why not walk to the train station?
“What about my shoes?” she asks. Her red high-tops are wet from the rain and her feet are damp and cold.
“We’ll buy them in Provence. We have many things to accomplish today. Make your vowels more precise. Run away together.”
“I don’t even know if you speak English,” Josie says.
“Does it matter?”
“Not at all. In fact, don’t tell me. We need one secret between us.”
“Do you have a secret?”
“I’ve told you all my secrets,” she says.
“Tell me about the book you read when you were young. The book that made you want to come to Paris.”
“Can we sit down? My stomach-”
“Are you going to be sick?”
“I don’t know. We started out too quickly. I’m not used to eating.”
Nico leads her across the street and into a building. She’s confused. Is he looking for a bathroom? It’s a museum-Rodin-but she doesn’t want to walk through a museum right now. He buys two tickets for the gardens, one euro each, and leads her outside again, into a lovely open space. There’s a long expanse of lush, verdant lawn and a wide basin at the far end. She’s stunned. Right here in the middle of Paris they’ve been transported to Eden.
Nico walks with her slowly across the long lawn and they find two lounge chairs at the water’s edge. Josie sits and sighs; her stomach roils.
“Shall I get you some water?”
Josie glances off to the right-there’s a café in the garden.
“No. Sit with me a moment.”
He sits beside her.
“Perhaps the baby doesn’t love wine after all.”
“Impossible,” Nico says.
She glances at him; he looks worried.
“I’m fine,” she assures him. “I’m a little tired. My body isn’t used to food.”
“Take your time. This is a good place to rest.”
They look out into the park. A crowd gathers around a sculpture, and Josie sees the head of Le Penseur towering above the mere mortals below. Other sculptures dot the landscape but Josie doesn’t care about them. She loves the green water in the basin, the long stretch of green lawn, the abundance of green leaves on the rows of trees. A gust of wind stirs the air around her and with it the smell of newly cut grass. She’s wrapped in her green blanket.
“I read the book so many times I could still probably recite the first paragraphs,” Josie says. “But I’ll spare you. It’s an odd little story. A young girl loses her parents in the Champ de Mars. She looks everywhere for them-and then she decides that they’ve gone up to the top of the Eiffel Tower without her. But she’s scared of heights. She can’t go after them. So she waits and waits. Finally it begins to get dark and her parents never appear. With terror in her heart, she begins to walk up the stairs of the tower.”
“Why doesn’t she take the elevator?”
“There are only steps. This is fiction.”
“Of course.”
“She walks and walks, and the higher she climbs the more frightened she becomes. But she can’t go back. She has to decide which is more frightening-life without her parents or climbing to the top of the tower. She keeps climbing. The sky darkens and night falls and soon all the lights of the city come on and there are as many stars below her as there are above. She’s never seen anything so beautiful in her whole life. She forgets that she’s scared and she runs to the top of the tower. There she circles the observation deck, looking up to the sky and down to the city streets with all the brilliant lights. She has no fear-she’s on top of the world.”
Josie pauses and takes a deep breath. Her stomach tightens and releases.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“And the girl on the top of the Eiffel Tower?”
“A guard comes up to her. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he says. I loved that word when I was little. It was my first French word. Mademoiselle. ‘Oui, monsieur,’ she says. She’s a very well-mannered little girl.”
“Is she American?”
“Oh, no. She’s very French. She lives on the edge of the Champ de Mars and she’s never ever gone up to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Now here she is. And she can see all of her city below her.”
“Her parents?”
“You are impatient,” Josie scolds. “So the guard tells her that the tower is closing and she’ll have to climb down again. She tells him that she’s lost her parents. He promises her that they’ll be waiting for her at the bottom of the tower. So she climbs down the many, many stairs, as happy as can be, because she’s no longer afraid of anything. At the bottom of the tower she steps out and it’s Paris and everything she’s ever known, but it all looks magically different now. She doesn’t see her parents anywhere and she skips home, imagining a life without parents. Maybe she’ll never go to school! Maybe she’ll kiss the boy she likes! Maybe she’ll wear the purple tights her mother hates! When she gets to her house she looks up into the window of her living room and she sees her parents standing there, under the bright chandelier, looking out. They don’t see her. She looks back at the Eiffel Tower. It’s sparkling with light. It’s positively luminous. When she looks back at her own house the lights go out.”
Josie smiles and rests her hands on her belly.
“That’s the end?” Nico asks.
“The end. In big, swirly letters. La fin.”
“This is a French book?”
“Of course it is. If it were an American book the girl would never be allowed to climb the stairs alone and the guard would have taken her to the police station, and even if she ran away and got home and saw her parents in the window she would have run to them and promised to never ever get lost again.”
“You think that’s it? She doesn’t go home again?”
“It’s not clear. Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t.”
“I think that’s a terrifying story,” Nico says.
“There you go. Vive la différence.”
“Between boys and girls?”
“Between a nice young Frenchman with blue eyes and a crazed American woman.”
Nico reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.
“You’re not crazy.”
“And that’s another thing. I need a haircut,” Josie says.
“Perhaps we can do that.” His fingers linger briefly in her hair.
“All in one day?” Josie asks.
“And you thought I was a mere French tutor.”
Josie sees Nico’s mischievous glance and notices how young he looks. There are no creases in the corners of his eyes. She has spent so many months looking into Simon’s eyes.
“I made up that story,” Josie tells him. “There is no book. There never was.”
Nico smiles. “Perhaps you’re not crazy, but you’re very creative.”
“I think the little girl never goes home. I think she finds the guard and asks him to take her home with him.”
“That might be dangerous.”
“But he’s a very nice man. He owns three dogs, all of them bigger than the little girl. They live together in his tiny apartment on the top of a hill in Montmartre.”
“What about her parents?”
“You’re so responsible,” Josie complains.
“I would miss my little girl,” Nico says.
“Of course you would.” She remembers that Nico has a child somewhere in Morocco, a child he’s never seen. She thinks of Nico as a child, lost in the root cellar, his parents searching for him. This is a man looking to be found, she thinks.
Simon stroked her back. They were sprawled in bed, post-sex, pre-sex, all of their time together a blur of sex. They were in San Francisco, at yet a different hotel. Simon saw someone he knew at the Clift and Josie had to pretend she was a stranger, asking directions to a club. “Sorry,” he told her, the friend in earshot. “I can’t tell you anything about clubs in this city. I’m an old man. Why don’t you ask the concierge?” Later Simon told her that the friend had said, “That girl is hot,” and Simon had said, “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” the man had said. “You’re the last married man in America.”
Simon had informed his wife about a series of Saturday meetings-he’d invented a nonprofit group that needed his expert help. He’d told his admin not to schedule anything for him at the end of the day on Friday because he needed to get back to San Rafael for a project he was working on with Brady. He was lying to everyone, and he did it with such ease that Josie thought he must be lying to her as well.
“How do you know this is love,” she asked, “rather than love of sex?”
He ran his tongue up the line of her spine.
She rolled over and faced him. “You said you loved me.”
“I do.”
“Maybe you just love sex with me.”
“I do.”
“Why is it that now that I have love, I’m immediately scared of losing love?”
“You think too much. Stop thinking.”
“When we make love I stop thinking.”
“Then let’s make love. It’s been too long.”
“Does this-does sex-matter more than anything else? Does it matter more than raising kids and having dinner parties and going to Cabo on vacation?”
“I wish I could do all of that with you.”
“But you can’t.”
“You wouldn’t even want it, Josie. You’re twenty-seven years old.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please. Come here.”
“I’m right here.”
“Come closer.”
“Did you have this with your wife?”
“Don’t.”
“I’ve never had this before.”
“I know, Josie. I’ve never had it before either.”
“But you trust it? You can tuck it inside of you and take it home with you?”
“We have to. There’s no other way.”
“Let’s make love really slowly. Let’s make love so it lasts for hours and hours.”
“It does,” Simon said. “It lasts for days. It lasts for all the time that I’m not with you.”
Josie moved into his arms.
“A haircut,” Josie says, pushing herself up off the lounge chair. “Off with her hair!”
“You feel better?” Nico asks, eyeing her warily.
“I do.” She puts her hands on her back and stretches, arching her back. She can feel the sun on her face. “Where shall we go?”
Nico stands and leads them to the exit of the Rodin Museum.
“There are lots of shops on rue Saint-Dominique. We’ll find something there.”
“Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
“Does your language school have rules about this sort of thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“How to spend your day with a client. Is my wish your command?”
“It’s not usually so complicated. Most students are happy to learn the names of vegetables at the market.”
“Have you ever fallen in love with a student?”
Nico smiles. “Before today?”
“You’re not in love. You’re a wonderful flirt, though. You can put that on your résumé.”
“Isn’t it possible that it’s love?”
“What about your French tutor? Aren’t you in love with her?”
“She has Philippe. I was just a diversion.”
“But you love her. You could love her.”
“I could love you.”
“No. It’s just a foolish question. I drank too much wine. Let’s find a hair stylist. I can’t go to Provence looking like a teenager.”
Josie’s hair is long and straight. She carries a clip in her purse, and when she’s warm she twists her hair and pins it to the top of her head. When she lets it down it falls to the middle of her back, a horse’s mane of deep chestnut that swings as she walks. She has never cut her hair more than a few inches.
They walk across the esplanade des Invalides and Nico reaches up and runs his fingers through her hair. She looks at him, surprised. It’s as intimate a touch as she’s felt in weeks. It stirs her and then angers her. She doesn’t want to remember.
“It’s a nuisance,” she says, tossing her head and stepping away from his hand. “I’m done with all that.”
“A shame,” Nico says.
“Voilà,” Josie calls after they’ve turned onto rue Saint-Dominique. She points across the street. “Perfect.” It’s a small salon, with a sign in the window that promises a shampooing et coupe for twenty-five euros. “On y va.”
Nico follows her. Josie has taken charge of the tour now-Nico follows a half step behind. She pushes open the door of the salon, which is all bright lights and gleaming chrome surfaces with techno music pounding, and greets the young woman at the desk. The woman’s hair is chartreuse and spiky. Maybe this isn’t the place to get a grown-up haircut after all.
“I’d like a cut,” Josie tells the woman in French. “I don’t have an appointment.”
“I can do it,” the young woman says, and Josie wonders for a brief moment if she’s really a stylist or if everyone’s out to lunch and the assistant wants to make some extra money on the side.
But soon enough Josie is draped in a robe, her hair is washed and combed, and she’s staring at herself in the mirror. She sees Nico standing behind her. The stylist asks what she wants and the music pounds in Josie’s ears.
“I want to look older and wiser,” Josie says. “I want to look like someone with a job and a boyfriend and a house in the country.”
“Non,” the woman says. “C’est pas possible.”
Josie looks at Nico as if she needs a translation. He shrugs. The woman starts cutting.
“Wait,” Josie says. “What are you going to do?”
“I will make you look like a movie star.”
“I don’t want to look like a movie star.”
All the while the woman’s fingers move at the speed of light and the click-click-click of the scissors reverberates in Josie’s ears. Hair drops to the floor in long clumps.
“Everyone wants to look like a movie star.”
“Which movie star?” Josie says weakly. She’s feeling nauseated again and this time it has nothing to do with the pregnancy.
“Where are you from?” the woman asks.
“The United States.”
“You speak French. Americans don’t speak French.”
“Some of us do.”
“There is an American movie star filming in Paris today. On the Pont des Arts in about an hour. We’re closing the shop soon. My receptionist already left to get a good spot.”
“Who is it?” Josie asks.
“Dana Hurley. She is incredibly sexy, no?”
“You’re cutting too much hair,” Nico tells the stylist.
“Who are you? The boyfriend?”
“No,” Josie says.
“Yes,” Nico says.
Josie glares at him.
“Alors,” the stylist tells Josie.
Josie closes her eyes and feels the young woman’s hands ruffle her hair. She feels light, weightless, as if she might float away.
“Does Dana Hurley have short hair?” she asks, her eyes still closed.
“Yes,” the stylist says. “Oh, I don’t know. They change their hair so often. In her last film she had a bob. It doesn’t matter what she does with her hair-she is someone I want to fuck.”
“She’s old, isn’t she?” Nico asks.
Josie hears them as if they’re far away. With her eyes closed and the snip of the scissors in her ear, the pounding of the techno-pop in her bones, the sensation of air on her neck, she feels transported somehow. Maybe she’s on her way to becoming someone else.
“Oh, she must be forty-five or so, but she is the woman we all want to be. She is sexy and passionate and good in her skin. You know what I mean?”
Bien dans sa peau. Good in her skin, Josie thinks. I haven’t been good in my skin since the last night I spent with Simon.
“I don’t know,” Nico says. “I’ve never gone for the older woman thing.”
“That’s because most older women lose something,” the stylist says. “They lose their fuckability. They stop thinking about sex all the time and they think about jobs and country houses.”
Josie opens her eyes. She sees someone else in the mirror. Her hair frames her face and her eyes look wide, her mouth looks full. She looks older and younger-she looks wild and she doesn’t look scared.
“Oui, chérie?” the stylist says, leaning close. “See what I mean? You are a movie star, no?”
She was grading papers in her cottage late at night when the doorbell rang. She opened the door and saw Simon standing there in the porch light, his hair tousled, his dress shirt untucked from his pants. He looked at her, his expression dark and unfamiliar.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
He stepped in and pulled the door closed behind him. He pushed her up against the wall and pressed his mouth on hers.
His kiss was hard and insistent. He pushed his leg between her legs and she could feel the weight of him against her.
When his mouth moved away from hers he made a noise, something low and guttural.
He took both her hands in one of his and held them above her head, pressed hard against the wall. She heard her own voice say his name. His other hand slid under the band of her pajama bottoms and rubbed against her, urgently, while his leg pushed her legs farther apart. She was wet, and when she started to say something only a noise escaped her mouth and again his mouth was on hers.
He pushed her pajamas down and they tangled at her feet. She heard his hand pull at his belt, at the fly, and he lifted her up and she wrapped her legs around him and then he was inside her. He released her hands and she wrapped them around his back while he pressed her hard against the wall, each thrust pounding her back, pushing them closer. A painting on the wall rattled. She could feel him deep inside her and she wanted even more of him.
“Don’t stop,” she managed to say when he started to come and his orgasm kept rolling and their bodies, now slick with sweat, kept pounding together against the wall.
When he was done, he held her for a moment, and their hearts beat furiously against each other. They stepped out of their pants and he carried her to the bedroom, laid her down, and buried his face between her legs. She pressed the back of his head, arched her back, and came in waves that rolled on top of one another.
And then he was inside her again. He was still hard, but he held her still and they didn’t move, their bodies wet and trembling.
She waited for a long time. Stay with me, Josie thought.
When he pulled out of her he looked at her and smiled-a sweet, exhausted grin.
His breath slowed. He ran his fingers over her stomach, her hips.
“Look at you,” he said. His voice sounded sad and lost.
His fingers moved to her breasts, massaging them and then teasing her nipples.
“You’re so young,” he said. “So impossibly young.”
Josie reached out and touched his face, ran her finger along his jaw.
“Don’t get all old man on me,” she teased.
“I can forget about youth,” Simon said, his voice quiet and serious. “I mean, I see it all the time-in movies, in ads, young men and women and their firm bodies, their smooth skin. But my own youth slips away, not noticeably, not enough to terrify me, until one day I end up in bed with a beautiful young woman. And then all at once, I’m an old man.”
They looked at each other, their faces close together on the bed, their hands both resting on each other’s hips.
“Is that it-your age? That’s what’s upsetting you?” she asked.
He winced, then closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he looked terribly sad.
“I’m a good man,” he said.
“I know that.”
“I never meant to do this to my wife.”
“Did she-”
“No, she doesn’t suspect. She wouldn’t suspect.”
He stopped and she waited for him to finish. She brushed his hair back from his forehead.
“It’s not an affair,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I’m too old to start over.”
“I’m not asking you to start over.”
“But I can’t give myself to you.”
“You give yourself to me every time we’re together.”
He touched her lips with his fingers.
“No, it’s not that,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s that I can no longer give myself to her.”
He looked close to tears. He looked like someone else, like someone she’d never seen before.
“You’re so fucking young,” he said.
“Why does that matter?” she asked.
“My wife. Now, every time I look at her, I see-”
“No, don’t. I don’t want to blame myself for that.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Don’t compare us. That’s not fair.”
“I can’t leave you behind. You’re with me all the time.”
He pulled her to him and they held each other.
“How long does it take for hair to grow?” Nico asks. He looks like a frightened boy.
“Oh, don’t be foolish. This is great. This is just what I wanted if only I had known what I wanted. I needed a lesbian to unleash me.”
“Turn around,” he says.
He spins Josie around, in the middle of the sidewalk, and a few people stop to stare. They all smile, as if they too are pleased with the tousled hair, the shy smile, the adoring young man.
“Bon,” Nico says decisively. “I still love you.”
“Don’t talk about love,” Josie says. “You’re not in love with me.”
Nico leans over and kisses Josie on the mouth. She steps back, her mouth open in a small O of surprise. Nico smiles and turns away from her.
“Follow me,” he says.
She stays where she is. People pass her on the street. She watches Nico walk jauntily ahead. She remembers the last time she saw Simon. “Wait for me,” he had said. He had kissed her, standing on her porch, more daring in the light of day than he’d ever been. She had watched him walk away, down the long, sun-drenched street toward his car. His body disappeared into the harsh glare of sunlight until her eyes burned with the strain of keeping him in sight. He was gone. Still she stood there, feeling his mouth on hers. Wait for me.
“Are you coming?” Nico calls from the corner.
She shakes her head. She watches him walk back toward her.
“Don’t be mad,” he says sweetly. “I had to do it.”
“He’s gone,” Josie says.
“Your lover?”
“I can’t show him my new haircut.”
Nico waits quietly for the rest.
“I can’t say goodbye.”
Nico puts his hand on her arm. “You are saying goodbye.”
Josie shakes her head and her hair tousles, then settles again. “You know what he taught me? He taught me to feel more. He taught me to give myself over to feelings. And now that’s all I have. I’m swamped by them. I can’t breathe because I feel so damn much.”
Nico takes her arm and leads her down the street. They walk for a long time. Finally they come to the end of a small street and ahead of them is an open stretch of lawn.
“I know where we are,” Josie says.
She looks down the stretch of grass and there sits the Eiffel Tower. It’s grand, majestic. It doesn’t matter how many times Josie has seen it, each time it takes her breath away.
“Let’s go,” Nico says, and Josie knows exactly what he has in mind.
Brady knocked on Josie’s office door even though it was open.
“Hey, you,” Josie said.
She stretched out a hand, offering him a seat across from her. She was reading a contemporary French novel that she had thought she might teach next semester. She wanted something new, something the kids would relate to. She already knew that the story was too adult for her kids, too racy and full of sex scenes that they would undoubtedly love, and that would get her into a ton of trouble, but she kept reading.
“Am I disturbing you?” Brady asked.
“No, not at all.” She put the book on her desk, cover down, as if she had been doing something illicit. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering…” Brady looked around the room, at the photos on her wall-photos she had taken of the creek behind her cottage-at the stack of books on the floor, and out the window where the rest of the students were piling into cars and heading home.
In the silence she watched him. He had Simon’s startling green eyes, Simon’s thick, wavy hair, Simon’s height. In the small room she realized that he smelled like Simon and she pushed the thought away. Of course, she thought. They use the same soap.
“My dad wants me to do the regular college thing. You know, liberal arts. Like everyone else in the world. That’s what I always thought I’d do. I mean, I never really thought about it, but now, I’m like a junior and I have to think about these things.”
It all came out in a breathless rush, as if he couldn’t stop himself.
“What do you want, Brady?” Josie asked.
“Well, that’s it. That’s what I was wondering. I mean, this is completely crazy, but I really loved doing the play. It’s like I was someone else up there and I get it. I really get how actors inhabit other people, like they give themselves up and they live in someone else’s body for a while. And this is the wild part, the part that I never would have figured out except it happened to me. When the play is over and you go back to being you again, you’re like a different you. You’re changed. It’s like you’re not the guy you played onstage, but you take a little bit of him back with you.”
He took a deep breath.
“You think I’m nuts, right?”
“No. I think you’re very smart.”
“Really? Cool. I’ve been thinking about this and I didn’t really know if I could explain it or anything. And then if I could, like, who would I tell.”
“Me.”
“Yeah. You get it, huh? That’s really cool.”
His smile was huge and he sat on the edge of his seat, his legs jangly, his fingers tapping on his knees.
“And the school thing?” Josie asked, though she already knew everything he was about to say.
“I could go to acting school. I could apply to UCLA Drama School and USC and the Tisch program at NYU, and I got all the catalogs and I read them before I go to sleep at night and then I can’t sleep, I’m so jazzed about this stuff. You should read what they say. I mean, it’s all about the stuff you talked about when we started the play. About searching within to find what you can bring to the part. About learning your character like you’re learning to breathe in a brand-new way.”
He stood up and walked to one of the photos on the wall.
“This is cool. This is really great. You took these?”
“Yeah. Last summer.”
“You’re great. You’re like the best teacher here.”
He swung around and looked at her and then dropped back into the chair.
“You gotta talk to my dad.”
“I don’t think so, Brady.”
“Yeah. You’d be so good at it. He’d listen to you. He’s not listening to me.”
“It’s not my job.”
“All you gotta do is tell him that I’m good enough. I’m good enough, right?”
She looked at him and saw that he was terrified in that moment, that he had no idea if he was good enough.
“You’re good enough, Brady,” she said.
He shot up out of his chair again. “So you gotta talk to him. Tell him that. Tell him lots of smart kids go to drama school.”
“I don’t know, Brady,” Josie said. “It’s not such a bad idea. What your dad wants. You can study acting later.”
“But it’s all I care about!” he shouted. “Don’t you get it? I thought you’d get it. I thought you’d help me out here.”
“I’ll talk to him,” she said quietly.
“Soon,” he said. “We’re flying down to look at schools next weekend. He’s like all fired up about this. Father-son bonding time. He was never around and now he’s my best fucking friend.”
Nico and Josie start to climb. The stairs of the tower wind around the inside of one of the legs, the Pilier Est. Josie feels like she’s in the belly of a giant erector set. It is hard work-Josie is glad that the stairs only go to the second level-after that, they have to take the elevator like everyone else. They’re alone in this maze of steel. At one point a young boy sprints past them, as if shot from a cannon below. Suddenly Josie feels old. How can that kid dash up these stairs? Wasn’t she young and fit about three weeks ago?
Josie catches glimpses of the city through the ironwork of the tower’s leg, a peek of the meandering River Seine on one side, the grassy stretch of the Champ de Mars on the other. She has no fear of heights; she is not the little girl in her story. She has lost her mother, but she sure as hell doesn’t expect to find her waiting at the top of the tower. Her father, though, might just be waiting for her, perched in the window of her childhood house, the chandelier lit above him, staring out into the street. He is waiting for Josie to come home. Maybe she’ll bring a nice young man with her, a boyfriend. That’s all he wants.
This is ridiculous, Josie thinks. Nico has invented some kind of therapy for her, some way for her to exorcize her grief while exercising her legs. Fine. At least they’ve stopped talking. At least he’s stopped staring at her like a hungry puppy.
At least she’s still wearing her sneakers and not some ridiculous pair of stiletto heels.
Nico is a few steps ahead of her, climbing steadily. Next she’ll find out he’s an Olympic athlete in his spare time. Odd, she thinks. She knows nothing about him. Why is he a tutor? Is that a career choice or something to do while writing poems? She used to be someone who was curious about people. She’d collect life stories from strangers on planes and buses. Now she talks to no one. And finally, here she is, spending a day with someone, and she’s learned so little about him. He loves another French tutor. He hid in the root cellar as a child. He has a child in Morocco. Who is he? Has he really fallen for her or is this his charming way to teach a foolish American girl? And why the hell is she following him to the top of the tower?
She tries to quiet the sound of her own ragged breath. It’s been too long since she hiked in the hills or biked out into the country. Since Simon. She’s lost her ability to breathe since Simon.
“What will we do in Paris once we’ve bought your new shoes?” Simon had asked.
She was the pro, the French speaker. He had traveled to Paris on business once or twice but knew nothing of the city. Had he been to the Eiffel Tower? Probably not. And, of course, now she’d never know.
“We’ll do the same thing we do here,” she had told him.
“Wrong,” Simon said, smiling. “We’ll drag our sorry asses out of bed and see the city. I want to walk every street of the city with you on my arm.”
It was going to be their first trip together, their first chance to go to sleep together and wake up together for six straight days.
“One more floor,” Nico calls out like a personal trainer urging her on to seventy-three more push-ups. Now the sky takes up more space, the river snakes longer and narrower, and the houses become rooftops, blending into one another.
Josie sees that the skies are darkening, and a cold breeze passes through. She can feel the wind on her neck and she remembers her haircut. She lifts her hand and runs it through her hair. He’ll never see it, she thinks.
“It’s not working,” she calls out to Nico.
“What’s not working?”
“Isn’t this your cure? Shouldn’t I be feeling better already?”
“Keep climbing,” he calls back.
Josie feels perspiration in the small of her back. She rolls her tank top up and wipes the sweat away. Then her hand snakes around to her belly, and she holds it there. It’s flat, it’s taut, it feels the same way it’s always felt. But she’s pregnant, she knows it. She had gone off the pill and Simon had started to use condoms. Did they ever forget?
The day in the rowboat. They weren’t thinking of condoms; they were thinking about the depth of the lake, the iciness of the water, the rockiness of the boat. They were risking his marriage, her job, his relationship with his son, her relationship with her father.
They never thought about the other risk they took.
Simon’s gone, Brady’s gone. She holds her hands over her belly and climbs the stairs.
“I have never been to the top of the tower,” Nico calls back.
“Are you afraid?” Josie asks.
“Of heights? No. Of love. Perhaps.”
“Is this about love?”
“Every French man and woman either loves the tower or hates the tower. You can’t ignore it. It’s here, blocking our view or gracing our view, every day. It doesn’t matter where you are. The tower is always there.”
“Do you love it or hate it?”
“Today I will decide,” Nico says.
Josie feels lighter on her feet. Somehow she has a second wind and the steps seem easier to scale. There is more air, a lighter breeze passing through. She loves the feeling of air on her neck.
“Today I will decide,” she calls up to Nico.
“About the tower?”
“About Provence,” she says. “Whether I will lose my mind completely and run off with my tutor.”
“This is a good place to lose one’s mind,” Nico tells her.
They met in a motel off Highway 101, a half hour from their homes. It was a little dangerous-Simon told her he didn’t have time for a long drive. He was getting sloppy. He had called her from his house a few days before, late at night, when his wife was sleeping. Ten minutes into the conversation, they heard a click and then Brady’s voice, “Hello? Dad? You on the phone?”
“I’ll be off in a second.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“Brady, go back to bed. I’ll be up soon.”
“Who you talking to?”
“Germany. It’s a business call. Please don’t interrupt us any more than you have.”
Brady slammed the phone down.
This time Simon said, “I won’t know anyone there. It’s a dive. I need to see you.”
“I know people who stay at dives,” Josie said.
“Please, Josie. I have something to give you.”
She called off a meeting with the Honor Society, which was planning a graduation tea.
“We only have a week till graduation,” Alicia Loy whined. “We have to meet now.”
“Alicia, it’s a damn tea,” Josie said, regretting it the minute the words were out of her mouth. “I can’t do it. I told you. I have an emergency.”
She arrived at the motel. It was worse than a dive-it looked abandoned and ready for demolition. She parked next to Simon’s Audi and knocked on the only room that was lit.
He opened the door and pulled her in, closing the door behind her.
“Don’t breathe,” he said. “It smells like someone died in here.”
“How romantic.”
He held her pressed against him, her back to his chest. He lowered his head and kissed the top of her head.
“On the bed,” he whispered, “is a gift.”
She looked at the wool blanket, the gray sheets, the lumpy pillows. She could see where the bed sagged in the middle.
“Under the bed,” she whispered, “is a dead body.”
“It only smells that way,” Simon told her. “I checked.”
“I don’t see your gift.”
“It’s where gifts always are: under the pillow.”
She turned in his arms and kissed him.
“If I stay really close to you,” she murmured, “then I can only smell you. And you smell wonderful.”
“Go get your gift.”
She pulled back and looked at him. He looked boyish in his pleasure.
She walked to the bed and lifted the closest pillow. An envelope. She reached for it and glanced at the front. A drawing of the Eiffel Tower. A good drawing, with an artistic flair.
“Did you draw this?” she asked.
“One of my many talents. And you thought I was only a good lay.”
“Wow,” she said. “An artist.”
“A French artist.”
“Drawing the Eiffel Tower doesn’t make you a French artist, my love.”
“Open the envelope.”
She did. Inside were two business-class plane tickets to Paris.
She turned toward him, her eyes wide.
“You can do this?”
“I can do this.”
“How?”
“A business trip. It doesn’t matter. We leave the day school ends for you.”
“I have teacher meetings. No-yes. I’ll cancel everything. We’re going to Paris!”
She threw herself into his arms.
“You’ll help me find a hotel. I didn’t know which neighborhood, I didn’t know whether you would want something grand or something intimate. I want to know all these things about you. I want to eat in wonderful restaurants without worrying about who will see us.”
“I’ll teach you French. We’ll talk dirty in French in bed with each other.”
“I’m terrible at languages.”
“I’ll be your French tutor.”
“You don’t talk dirty in English.”
“That’s just because I can’t catch my breath.”
“Say ‘Undress me’ in French.”
“Déshabille-moi.”
“Say ‘Fuck me.’ ”
“Baise-moi.”
“Say ‘Devour me.’ ”
“Dévore-moi.”
“Say ‘Don’t ever stop.’ ”
“N’arrête jamais.”
“Say you’ll come with me to Paris.”
“Je t’aime.”
Nico and Josie reach the top of the tower. Josie takes a deep breath and finally allows herself to look out. She was glad for the elevator ride, but she kept her eyes closed as she was whisked to the top.
Now she looks out, way out. The observation tower is crowded with people who all seem to be speaking at once-a jumble of languages and sounds. She walks slowly, unsteadily, to one window. She feels as if she’s not yet landed, that her legs need to keep climbing. She’s got sea legs, miles above the sea.
When she reaches the window she takes in a lungful of air and then holds it. It’s as if she doesn’t want to let go of what she sees. All of Paris is spread before her, from the heights of Sacré-Coeur, down along the banks of the Seine, out to the farthest reaches of each arrondissement. The clouds swirl around her, at eye level, and every once in a while the city disappears and she’s heaven-bound. Then a gust of wind pushes away the cloud and, like magic, Paris sits at her feet.
She looks straight out into the sky and sees what Simon must have seen in his small plane. Clouds, sky, space. It’s enormous and infinite and thrilling.
“Take me,” she had said when he told her how he loved to fly.
Now she knows. Now she has a piece of him that was missing. He loved this: the wild space of it, the changing possibility of clouds and sky, the power of height.
“Thank you,” she says to Nico when he comes to her side.
He stands next to her for a long while, both of them silent, both gazing out into the sky.
Josie remembers the weight of Simon’s body after they would make love. They would fall into each other, wrapping themselves as closely into each other’s bodies as possible. “Come closer,” he would say. “Yes,” she would say. After losing themselves during sex, they would land, and they needed to take away all the space between them.
Did he die in the sky? Did something happen in the plane while it flew through the sky? Is this what he saw before he died? Or did he come to earth and die when the plane crashed into the hard, unyielding ground? Did he and Brady know they were going to die? Did they hold each other and wait for it to happen?
“Take me,” she had said to Simon.
He left without taking her.
She makes a sound and Nico puts his arm around her.
The clouds move in and surround them. They can no longer see the city below. They’re wrapped in silvery black clouds, cocooned in space.
“I love it,” Nico says finally. “My tower. My Paris.”
Simon had said he’d come over to Josie’s cottage after dinner. He told his wife another client was in town, that once again he needed to stop by the guy’s hotel to buy him a drink and talk up tomorrow’s meeting. When the doorbell rang Josie thought Simon was early. She ran to the door, threw it open, and saw her father standing on the porch, flowers in his hand.
“Dad!”
“I’m disturbing you?”
“No, of course not. I’m just surprised.”
“Your old man was in the neighborhood.”
She ran dates through her mind-it wasn’t her mother’s birthday, their anniversary, the anniversary of her death.
“You don’t need an excuse,” she said. “Come have dinner with me.”
“Dinner? I don’t need dinner. I just need a little time with my girl.”
“I’m eating, Dad. You want time with me, you have to eat, too.”
She stepped aside and let him pass. He clung to his flowers as if he had no intention of giving them to her.
“Smells good in here,” he said, heading straight to the kitchen.
“I gotta make a call, Dad. Pour yourself a glass of wine. I’ll throw in the pasta in a second.”
“Pasta. Wine. I should come more often.”
She smiled and kissed him. He seemed smaller. No, she was used to standing on tiptoe to kiss Simon.
She walked into her bedroom and closed the door. She had to reach Simon, to tell him not to come. He’d be home, having dinner with his wife and Brady. She’d call on his cell phone but still, it was risky. She had to do it-she didn’t want him showing up with her dad here.
She dialed his number. It rang and rang. She hung up and texted him: Call me.
They were careful about text messages-too easy for his wife to pick up the phone and find the revealing words.
She waited a few minutes, pacing in her room. It was rude to leave her dad alone after he had driven all this way. Simon was probably in the middle of dinner. She’d try him again later.
She found her dad in the kitchen looking for a vase.
“Up here,” she told him, and reached above the refrigerator for the tall glass cylinder. “They’re beautiful.” Blue irises. Her mother loved irises. Again Josie tried to remember what day it might be-not Mother’s Day or her father’s birthday. Something made him get in the car and drive an hour and a half to drop in. She didn’t have a clue.
She took the flowers and placed them in the vase, filled it with water. She set the vase on the windowsill, next to her kitchen table. “Nice,” she said, pleased. “You’ve never brought me flowers.”
“Someone should spoil you,” he said.
The phone rang. She leapt at it.
“Hey, you,” Simon whispered in her ear.
“Mr. Reed. Thanks for calling me back. I need to talk to you about your son’s college choices. He and I met a few days ago and I promised I’d chat with you.”
“Well, thank you, Ms. Felton. Very responsible of you.”
“But my father just dropped in for a visit. Let’s talk about this another time?”
“You go ahead,” her father insisted. “I can wait.”
She shook her head. Now there would be no reason to take the phone into the other room. She was caught in her lie.
“Why don’t we talk about it during the parent-teacher conference tomorrow,” Josie said into the phone. “What time are you coming by? I have it written somewhere-”
“Can you go home for lunch?” Simon whispered. “I’ll stop by then. Brady and I fly out at three.”
“Noon it is, then. Thanks very much, Mr. Reed.”
She hung up the phone.
“You’re very good at what you do,” her father said. “It seems like it wasn’t very long ago that I might have been having that conversation with one of your teachers.”
No, Josie thought. You would never have had that conversation.
She walked over and kissed him again.
“Thanks for coming, Dad. I’ve missed you.”
“You could visit once in a while. It wouldn’t kill you.”
“I have so much work on the weekends.”
“You bring it with you. I can cook you a dinner once in a while. Where’s that wine? I couldn’t find it.”
Josie found a bottle of wine in her cupboard and opened it. Her father never would have had an affair. He was such a good husband, such a loyal man. But Simon had told her that he had never imagined that he would slip out the back door and take another woman to bed. “I’m a good man,” he had told her. Had he stopped being a good man when he fell in love with her?
She poured wine into their glasses. She handed her father a glass and took a sip of hers. An evening with her dad instead of her lover. She wasn’t disappointed. It was a chance to catch her breath.
“Sit down and let me get this meal together,” she told him.
He sat at the table and watched her. She put the pasta in the boiling water, then set the small table. She already had the sauce made-a simple tomato sauce with herbs from her garden. She tossed the salad with some vinaigrette.
“Look at you,” her dad said. “You would have made your mom proud.”
Josie smiled. She had often thought of that: Mom should see me cook. Mom should see me teach. But when she began her affair with Simon she no longer wished her mother alive to watch over her. When she thought about her mother now, she felt a hot blast of shame.
“Tell me what’s new, Dad. How’s the store?”
“Same old,” he said. “Nothing changes anymore. One of these days I’ll sell out and move to Palm Springs.”
“No you won’t,” Josie said. “You’d leave me?”
“Maybe you’ll visit more in Palm Springs.”
“Hey, guess what. I’m going to Paris!”
The timer rang and she tested the pasta, then poured it into the colander. She heated it with the sauce for a moment while she concocted her lie.
“You remember Whitney? My friend from college? We’re going together for six days.”
“You can afford something like that on your teacher’s salary?”
“Whitney got a great deal. I’m really happy about it. Paris!”
“Yeah. Good for you, Josie. You bring me back one of those berets the old men wear. I’d look good in one of those.”
Josie smiled. “You’d look great in one of those.”
She served them and sat across from her father.
“You really going to move to Palm Springs?”
“Who knows? I’m thinking about it. There’s a lady I know who’s got a place down there. She wants me to visit.”
“A lady?”
“You never heard of a lady before?”
“A girlfriend lady?”
“It’s not impossible.”
“Dad. That’s great. Since when?”
“Since never. I said it’s not impossible.”
“Tell me about the lady.”
“Somebody I met at bridge. A nice lady.”
“I’m glad, Dad. I’m really glad.”
“So what’s wrong with you? Your old man can meet a lady and you can’t bring home a boyfriend?”
“I’ll bring home a boyfriend, Dad. I promise.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know. It’s very complicated. There’s a man I like. I don’t know.”
“What’s not to know?”
“Like I said, it’s complicated.”
Her father put his wineglass down on the table. He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“He’s married,” he said, his voice low.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Love isn’t complicated. Married men are complicated.”
“Forget I said anything.”
“Your mother would be very upset with you.”
“Don’t bring her into this.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Dad. Sit down.”
Her father walked into the other room. Josie was furious with herself for saying something-there was no reason to talk about Simon. She got up and followed her father into the living room.
He was standing by the front door as if considering his escape. He gazed through the window; his face was dark and brooding.
“This is the day your mother was diagnosed,” he said quietly, as if he weren’t even talking to her. “Eight years ago.”
“Oh,” Josie said weakly. She stood back, scared that if she went to him, he’d throw open the door and disappear.
“I went with her to the doctor’s appointment. We thought it was nothing-some swelling in her ankles, a little discomfort, nothing important. But you know how much she hated the doctor.”
His hands hung limply at his sides. He looked helpless, lost, as if what happened eight years ago happened over and over again.
“She went in to the appointment and I stayed in the waiting room with all the ladies. Then the nurse came into the room and said, ‘The doctor will meet with you now.’ I knew everything I needed to know right then. I didn’t need him to say a word.”
“How was Mom?” Josie asked.
“Quiet. Scared. We sat in front of the doc’s desk in his fancy office and listened to him talk about surgery and chemo and new kinds of treatment. But right then I knew: I had lost her. I lost my world. I lost my life.”
There were tears running down his face. Josie swiped at her own face with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry I was so far away,” she said.
“Oh, you did what you needed to do. What all kids do. We never blamed you for that.”
“Come have dinner with me, Dad.”
“Eight years go by. And there’s still all these feelings I have. Like I can’t gather them up and put them away in a box.”
Josie walked over to her father. He turned toward her and let her hold him.
After a moment he stepped away. “No married men,” he said.
“Who said anything about a married man?” she told him.
Nico and Josie take the elevator down from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
“Let’s walk along the Seine,” Nico says.
“This is the first day I have spent back in the world,” Josie tells him as they head toward the river. First they walk along the wide boulevard at the side of the road; below them, to their left, is the Seine and across it, the Grand Palais. Farther up is the Louvre. Then a stairwell takes them to a lower path, one that brushes the river and protects them from the street traffic and the mad crush of pedestrians.
“You have been hiding?”
“Hiding?” Josie says, considering the word. “No, there’s no place to hide. I try the bed, with the covers pulled high, but even then, it finds me and knocks me out.”
“Sadness?”
“I wish it were sadness. That seems kinder than what I feel now. It’s a gut punch now. It’s a wallop of grief.”
“When your mother died…?” Nico lets the question trail off. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m asking too many questions.”
“You are,” Josie says. But she slides her hand around his arm and walks at his side with their arms linked together.
They’re quiet for a while. The clouds have darkened the sky and they hear thunder far off in the distance.
“When my mother died,” Josie says, “I remember thinking I was no longer a child. It all ended at once. I had just graduated from college, I was thousands of miles from home, and then she was gone. I floated for a while-it’s so different. This grief has me crawling on the earth; that time I was cut loose and I couldn’t ground myself. I had a lot of sex. Isn’t that odd? I slept with every boy I knew-old friends, new friends, passing acquaintances. I guess I was trying to feel something. Now I feel too much.”
“What happened?”
Josie looks at him, puzzled. “Oh, not much. I spent a year or two like that. And then I missed my father. All at once. I applied for every teaching job within a hundred miles of home. And I ended up in Marin. I never told him I came home to be with him.”
“Why not?”
“Because once I got there, I rarely saw him.”
Josie thought of her dad’s last visit. They never talked about Simon again. They ate pasta and salad, they drank their wine in silence. After a while, he told a long story about two boys who tried to rob the grocery store but they got in a fight in the middle of the robbery. One boy punched the other, and they chased each other out of the store. Josie told her dad to sell the place; maybe Palm Springs was a good idea. It was so simple, sitting and sharing dinner with her father. When he got up to leave she said, “I’ll come down next weekend.” His face lit up.
And then Simon died. She called her father and told him she was sick in bed and couldn’t travel.
“I’m tired of talking,” Josie says to Nico, but she keeps her arm tucked around his. “Tell me about the woman you love. The other tutor.”
“Did I mention her?”
“You did. You sleep with her but not with her boyfriend.”
“Hmm. I must have had too much to drink at lunch.”
“What is her name?”
“Chantal.”
“A pretty name.”
“A pretty woman. I only slept with her once. Though she’s in my mind many nights when I go to bed.”
“We imagine love so easily.”
“Yes. That is the simple part.”
“Does she love you?”
“She has a boyfriend, remember.”
“Does she love her boyfriend?”
“I can’t imagine. But then I don’t understand women very well. He has a reputation of sorts. He’s been known to sleep with his students.”
“Not you,” Josie says, smiling. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“I would not get so lucky,” Nico says.
“But you were lucky enough to sleep with his girlfriend.”
“Yes. Last week we all went out for a few drinks after work.”
“You’ll do that tonight?”
“Tonight I’m taking a train to Provence.”
“Of course.”
A bateau-mouche glides by on the river and they hear the loudspeaker barking out indecipherable words. They both turn to look. The tourists all seem to be looking at them: a couple strolling along the Seine. It should have been Simon, she thinks. She takes her hand away from Nico’s elbow and tucks her hands in her pockets.
“That night…” she says, prompting him. The boat passes by and they continue walking.
“That night Philippe was flirting with a girl at the café. She was sitting at a table nearby, with her dog at her feet, and he kept walking over and petting the dog. Finally he invited the girl to join us. For me, he said. So I wouldn’t be so lonely. The girl and her dog moved to our table. I knew that Chantal was unhappy with Philippe; she is often unhappy with him. But she usually goes home with him at the end of each evening. I don’t understand her.”
“But you love her.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I love her. She’s beautiful in a very serious way. Not like you.”
“I’m beautiful in a silly way.”
“Not at all. Even now, you have something so alive in you.”
“Even now.”
“You will come through this.”
“You’re very kind. And you’re off the subject. Chantal.”
“Yes,” Nico says. “Chantal was angry. She doesn’t show her emotions very easily. But I watch her face and I see how it changes.”
“I like you, Nico.”
He stops walking and looks at Josie.
“No kissing,” she says. “Keep walking and keep talking.”
“Chantal doesn’t like dogs. The girl’s little dog climbed up on Philippe’s lap and sat there looking very smug.”
“And the girl?”
“She was loud. She told a bawdy story about getting a lap dance from a stripper in a club the night before. Philippe asked her if she likes girls, and she said she likes girls and boys and foreigners. She especially likes foreigners.”
“Charming.”
“Chantal asked me to walk her home. Philippe was supposed to say no, that he would take her. Philippe was too busy having his fingers licked by the awful dog.”
“You walked her home.”
“I walked her right into bed. It was revenge sex. But when we were done Chantal asked me not to tell Philippe.”
“So why did she sleep with you?”
“To prove that she didn’t care about the girl and her dog.”
“Does she know that you love her?”
“No-yes. I don’t know what I feel. How could she know what I feel?”
“Sometimes women are better at this than men.”
“True,” Nico says. “If I meet her for a drink tonight she’ll tell me if I love her. But if I go with you to Provence, I’ll never know.”
“You deserve love,” Josie tells him.
Nico looks at her and she sees that his face is open with hope.
“Look,” Josie says, pointing ahead. “The film shoot that the hairstylist told us about.”
They can see a mass of people ahead, spread across both sides of the river. On the Pont des Arts, an iron pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine from the Institut Français on the Left Bank to the Louvre on the Right Bank, there are cameras and lights and a couple of tents set up at the far side.
“Let’s go watch,” Josie tells him, her voice excited.
“Why is everyone so starstruck?” Nico asks, holding back.
Josie takes his hand and pulls him forward. “Oh, come on. We need our movie stars. We need the big screen.”
“Why? Why is that any more important than this? Because it has bright lights and cameras?”
“Because it’s bigger than we are. We disappear. This day? Tomorrow it’s gone. But that-that might be a day on the Seine that happens over and over for a hundred years.”
After the funeral-with the two matching caskets-after Josie left the hundreds of students and parents and friends and relatives and drove herself home, she lowered the shades in her cottage and crawled into bed. She took a sleeping pill and sometime in the middle of a dreamless sleep, the phone rang.
Before she thought better, she reached over to her bedside table and answered it.
“You okay?” It was Whitney again. After months of silence, Whitney was back. The married boyfriend was gone.
“I can’t talk, Whitney. I’m sleeping.”
“Don’t talk. Listen.”
“I don’t want to listen.”
“This is for the better-”
“Fuck off, Whitney.”
“I don’t mean his death. That’s tragic. And his son. I can’t believe it.”
Josie hung up the phone. Her mouth was dry and there was no water left in the glass by her bed. She pushed herself up and out of bed. She was sweaty from sleeping under too many covers. She threw off her clothes and when she glanced in the mirror she saw her body, the body that Simon made love to over and over again. She turned away, found fresh pajamas, and covered herself in them.
She shuffled to the kitchen and poured a glass of water.
The window was filled with late-evening light and her father’s blue irises. She had forgotten to move them and lower the shade. She dropped into the seat and gazed at the flowers. Then behind them, through the window, she saw a deer. It looked at her and tilted its head to one side. Then it turned away, and in one graceful leap, it crossed the creek and disappeared into the woods.
I want to leave, Josie thought. I want to flee.
She walked to the phone and picked it up. She called her boss, the head of the school, at her home.
“Did you go to the funeral?” Stella asked. “There were so many people there. I didn’t see you.”
“I was there,” Josie said.
“That poor woman,” Stella muttered.
“Listen,” Josie said. “This might be bad timing. But I wanted to tell you that I won’t be back next year.”
“Let’s talk about this on Monday, Josie.”
“I have to do it now. I’ll finish up classes. But that’s it.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“I don’t know,” Josie said.
“You’ve been very distracted. Is something going on?”
Josie mumbled her goodbye and hung up.
She walked back into her bedroom. She was thankful for the darkness again. The room smelled rank. For a moment she remembered Simon’s smell and she felt an ache in her chest. She covered her face with her hand and breathed in her own sour smell instead.
She walked to her dresser and picked up an envelope. She saw the drawing of the Eiffel Tower. At the top of the tower she saw two tiny figures. One had long hair; the other was very tall, with two green dots for eyes. She touched his mouth with her finger.
She opened the envelope. In two and a half weeks she would go to Paris. She didn’t know what would happen after that. But for now, she had Paris to get her through her days.
Josie and Nico finally find a spot from which to watch the film shoot. Nico has led her to the top deck of a floating restaurant on the edge of the quai. It’s a long boat, with beautiful teak floors and deck chairs and white umbrellas. There’s a bar at the far end of the boat, crowded with people, all with drinks in hand. Josie and Nico squeeze past the crowd and lean against the railing with an unobstructed view of the bridge.
Next to them, a waiter has opened a bottle of champagne as if this were a premiere or a national event of great importance. He pours champagne, and the group-young office workers, perhaps, all escaping work to watch the filming-clink glasses.
“I’m not convinced that this is art that will last for a hundred years,” Nico says.
A bed sits in the middle of the Pont des Arts. It’s just a bed-a frame and mattress, thrown onto the wooden deck of the pedestrian bridge. A naked woman sprawls across the bed, on a rose-colored sheet. She’s young and beautiful, and the enormous crowd on both sides of the river seems caught in a kind of reverential silence.
“Stop being a grump,” Josie whispers. They are pressed together against the rail of the boat. “Isn’t that Pascale Duclaux?” She points to a woman with a wild mess of red hair, perched in a chair at the edge of the set. “She’s a very serious director. This may very well be great art.”
“A bed on a bridge? A naked nymph?”
“And a man,” Josie says. “Check out the old man.”
A gray-haired man, also naked, circles the bed, his eye on the lovely girl. Dana Hurley, the American actress, stands at the edge of the bridge, her back against the rail, watching them. Unlike the other two, she’s fully dressed. The man doesn’t seem to notice her.
Then the man stops for a moment, his penis wagging between his legs, and he looks up, as if searching for something. He seems to catch Josie’s eye and he holds it, a half smile on his face.
He’s no older than Simon, Josie thinks. So why does it bother me so much that he’s stalking this girl?
She looks away, breaking his stare. When she looks back, he resumes his awful walk, around the bed, as if roping the girl in.
The skies rumble and, in an instant, rain pours down. This part of the boat isn’t covered-everyone turns and pushes back, under the white umbrellas or down below, under the deck. Josie stands there, watching the bridge, the bed, the girl, the man.
“Come on,” Nico says. “This is crazy.”
“Go ahead,” she tells him. “I want to watch.”
“There’s nothing to watch. They’re going to wait for the rain to stop.”
But the director signals for the cameras to keep rolling.
Josie keeps her eye on Dana Hurley. Dana doesn’t run. She’s already soaked, her hair matted to her head. She walks toward the bed as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. She won’t lose her man to a young girl. She won’t lose anyone to cancer or plane crashes. If something terrible happens the director will call “Cut!” and Dana will saunter back to her tent, where a fawning assistant will bring her a towel and a glass of champagne.
Josie realizes that Nico is right: This is not great art-this has nothing in it that will last longer than a day. The only thing that lasts is love, even when it’s gone.
“Please,” Nico says. “Come inside.”
She turns to him. He is the nicest man she has ever met. For a moment she feels unburdened by grief. Even the sound of his voice offers something like hope. Yet she can’t go to Provence with him. They are writing an ending to their own movie, a fairy-tale ending, and she no longer believes in fairy tales.
“I need to go back to my hotel,” she tells him.
“Now?”
“I’ll pack my bags,” she lies. It is so much easier than saying goodbye. “I’ll meet you at the train station at six.”
His face lights up. Thunder crashes and, in an instant, lightning blasts through the gray skies and all of Paris shines in its glow.